Errera, Farrell receive prestigious award

Two graduate students in the College of Geosciences have been named 2011 Gramm Fellows, a recognition for outstanding research and teaching at Texas A&M.

Reagan Errera and Eugene Farrell, oceanography and geography doctoral students, respectively, were among a select few graduate students at the University to receive the 2011 U.S. Senator Phil Gramm Doctoral Fellowship Award. The selection committee looks for candidates who “exemplify the meaning of scholar/mentor in the highest sense.”

Philip Murtaugh '10

[The below message was adapted from an e-mail sent by Philip Murtaugh ’10 to Department of Geography faculty]

I'm working at an industrial distribution company in Houston called DXP Enterprises. We offer a pretty impressive and diverse range of services, but we're really big in the pump business. I'm in kind of a technical/outside sales position. It's a neat job with endless growth potential and I'm thrilled to be here. Our biggest customers are in the oil and gas industry (Schlumberger, Haliburton, Weatherford, Cameron, etc.).

Oceanographer plows the Southern Ocean

Texas A&M oceanography professor Alejandro (Alex) Orsi is one of 40 scientists braving Antarctic weather and waters aboard the ice-breaker research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer.

Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Kenneth Bowman and graduate student Cameron Homeyer are using weather observations and forecasts, along with a computer model Bowman created, to predict the path that air passing over Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plants could take in following days. Short term predictions for a few days are reasonably accurate, but projections beyond four or five days have the same limited reliability inherent to all weather forecasts. Bowman also cautions that these models only predict the paths that air will follow and not how much radioactivity will spread. Much is still unknown about the altitude and magnitude of the releases and currently the only knowledge of how much radioactivity was released comes from news reports.

Thanks to a $486,000 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, Geography Professor Steven Quiring is now working on a drought-prediction system for the United States' Great Plains region.