Mia Enders, a junior Geology major from Bath, NY, with Dr. Thomas Hegna, operates equipment that pulverizes and grinds rocks for analysis.
SUNY Fredonia science students will present research at the spring regional Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting.
The seven students represent the largest cohort of SUNY Fredonia students attending a GSA regional meeting over five years.
They will be joined by Department of Geology and Environmental Sciences faculty as well as an emeritus professor and alumnus from the same department who will each give oral presentations or participate in presentations at the 2025 Joint Northeastern and North-Central Section Meeting. The meeting will be held March 27 to 30 at the Bayfront Convention Center in Erie, PA.
The GSA field trip, “Back in Time through the End Devonian Mass Extinction in Western New York,” will be led by student Jasper Bateman, Associate Professor Thomas Hegna and Randy Blood, who received a bachelor’s degree in Geology in 2003.
Associate Professor Matthew Purtill will deliver a talk, “Unveiling Links between Grain-size Parameters and Depositional Environments and Processes: Initial Results Experimenting with Multivariate Statistical and Artificial Neural Network Approaches.”
Professor Emeritus Gordon Baird will give a talk, “Late Famennian Rock Units in Dynamically Unstable Context: Cleveland Shale-Bedford Formation Interval, Northern Ohio.”
Dr. Hegna will give a talk, “Teaching Critical Thinking on a Flat Earth.”
Associate Professor Wentao Cao will chair two discipline sessions of talks.
Oral and poster sessions chaired by Dr. Cao share the same title, “Petrotectonic Processes in Convergent Margins: Insights from Laurentia and Beyond.”
Students and faculty who assisted students and are slated to present posters, include:
• Jasper Bateman, a sophomore majoring in Geology, with a minor in Museum Studies, from Buffalo, N.Y., with Hegna, “Revising Away a Living Fossil: Restudy of Fossil Notostracans from the Permo-Triassic of the USA.”
• Cece Young, a senior majoring in Geology, from Collins, N.Y., and Hegna, “Preliminary Work on the Stratigraphy of the Lower Portion of the Northeast Shale, Chautauqua County, NY.”
• Sydney Lamberton, a senior majoring in Adolescence Education: Earth Science and Psychology, from Pennsylvania, with Hegna and Cao, “Looking for Critical Minerals in Carboniferous Clays Beneath Coal Deposits in Pennsylvania: A Multipronged Approach.”
• Mia Enders, a senior majoring in Geology, with a minor in Chemistry, from Bath, N.Y., with Cao, “Preliminary Results on Critical Mineral Concentration in the Upper Devonian Strata at Selected Localities in Western New York.”
• Cao, with Enders as second author, “Monazite Petrochronology of a Garnet-Bearing Gneiss from Southern Brasίlia Orogen.”
• Callie Carter, a senior majoring in Chemistry, from Findley Lake, N.Y., with Hegna, “Green Graptolites: Glauconitic Replacement of Soft-Tissues in Fossil Record.”
• Bea Roof, a senior majoring in Environmental Science, with a minor in Biology, from Jamestown, N.Y., with Hegna, “Establishing a Baseline of Littoral Zooplankton Abundance in the Fredonia Reservoir in Pomfret, NY.”
• Rachel Echevarria, a senior majoring in Environmental Sciences and Geology, with minors in Physics and Biology, from Fredonia, N.Y., with Hegna, “An Ontogenetic Study of a Newly Discovered Population of Cyzicus Gynecius (Crustacea: Branchiopoda: Spinicaudata) from Mud Lake (Cassadaga, NY) using SEM imagery.”
A poster will be presented by Fredonia High School student Jacob Salisbury, with Hegna, “A New Species of Clam Shrimp from a Peculiar Green Chert Facies of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, Wyoming.”
Funding support for SUNY Fredonia attendance at this meeting has been provided by Susan Mara, a 1973 graduate who received a degree in Geology, through the Fredonia College Foundation.
More information about the meeting is available here.
