University of Calgary
GEOSCIENCE
June 2012
June 21, 2012
Students win top awards at Vision 2012 Geoconvention
Congratulations to Peter Gagliardi and Byron Kelly, who received the awards for Best Student Geophysical Oral Presentation and Best Student Geophysical Poster Presentation at the Vision 2012 Geoconvention in Calgary, Alberta on May 14-18, 2012. The awards were presented at the CSEG Technical Luncheon on June 18. Peter and Byron are both masters’ students working with Dr. Don Lawton as members of CREWES.
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June 11, 2012
Student receives award and gives citation speech
The picture shows Rebekka, Doug Oldenburg,
J. Tuzo Wilson medalist 2012,
and Gail Atkinson, CGU President.Congratulations to Rebekka Steffen, who received the award for Best Student Presentation in Geodesy at the joint Canadian Water Resources Association - Canadian Geophysical Union National Conference in Banff on June 8, 2012. Moreover, she was invited by the CGU Executive Committee to give the citation speech for this year's J. Tuzo Wilson medalist, Professor Douglas W. Oldenburg from University of British Columbia. The J. Tuzo Wilson medal is the highest national honour given by the Canadian Geophysical Union.
June 5, 2012
Sytle Antao Wins Young Scientist Award
Sytle Antao wins the Young Scientist Award from the Mineralogical Association of Canada at the GAC-MAC Annual Meeting in St. John’s, Newfoundland, May 2012. This award is given to a young scientist who has made a significant international research contribution in a promising start to a scientific career.
Sytle is a mineralogist who studies crystal structures of minerals under different conditions of pressure (P), temperature (T), and composition (X), using state-of-the-art in situ experimental techniques to investigate their stabilities and properties, and applies the results to mineral physics and earth processes. Her research is at the atomic scale. She is very motivated, excited, and passionate about science.
Sytle obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2006 from Stony Brook University, she did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, and joined the University of Calgary (UofC) in 2008. She was awarded an Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award in 2009 and NSERC Discovery grant in 2009. She received the Department of Geoscience Research Excellence Award in 2010.
She gained considerable research experience at several neutron and synchrotron international laboratories. She uses the large-volume multi-anvil press and the diamond-anvil cell (DAC) to investigate phase transitions and short-range structural transitions using high-energy scattering for pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of minerals, nano-particles, and glasses. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), she was a team member that commissioned a high-resolution powder X-ray diffraction (HRPXRD) beamline. Her research provides insights into the mechanisms by which minerals are formed and why CO2-containing minerals, for example, have an important role to play in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and climate-change issues. Presently, she is supervising four graduate students who are investigating several mineral groups, such as zircon, garnet, apatite, and kyanite.
At this early stage in her scientific career, she has nearly 50 peer-reviewed publications in various international journals. In addition to being a promising top young researcher, she teaches courses in mineralogy and modern experimental methods. She has revised and re-organized her mineralogy courses. She uses multi-disciplinary approaches to make students think outside geosciences and apply their mineralogy to different fields of science.
Sytle encourages her students to take graduate courses in Chemistry and use the single-crystal X-ray diffractometer in the Department of Chemistry for their research. Her research can be classified broadly as in the general field of material science, nanoscience, inorganic or solid-state chemistry. She has the tools of physicists and chemists to tackle natural geological problems.