Texas Earth & Space Science Revolution 

TXESS People January, 2008

Kathy Ellins, the program manager at UTIG, is the lead principal investigator on the TXESS Revolution at UTIG where she specializes in Geoscience Education. She has a Masters in Science Education from New York University and a Ph.D. in Geography from Columbia University (LDEO). Kathy is active at the national and local levels in Earth science education reform, served on the IRIS Education Committee, and was involved in EarthScope and the Integrated Ocean drilling Program (IODP) education and outreach planning. Kathy currently serves on USAC, the U.S. Science Advisory Commitee to the  IODP.  Kathy and  Hilary Olson have an eight-year history of providing professional development to K-12 science educators in Texas.

Hilary Olson is a research associate at UTIG where she specialized in stratigraphic studies using seismic, core and biostratigraphic data. She has a BS in Earth Sciences from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Geology from Stanford University. Currently, Hilary is working on three projects at the Institute for Geophysics. As part of
her industry-sponsored  Gulf Intraslope Basins (GIB) project, Hilary and her colleagues are looking at depositional styles in the Gulf of Mexico in relationship to glacial and interglacial cycles. As part of the Gulf Basin Depositional Synthesis (GBDS) team, she is responsible for incorporating biostratigraphic data into the project to better understand the geologic timing of events in the geologic history of the Gulf of Mexico.  Hilary's role in the TXESS (TeXas Earth and Space Science) Revolution program is in assisting with professional development in Earth and Space Science
throughout the state of Texas.

Eleanour Snow is the co-principal investigator on the TXESS Revolution project. She has been teaching Geology at the University level for 21 years, the last 17 at the University of South Florida, Tampa.  Her scientific training is in mineralogy and structural geology (PhD, Brown University, 1987).  For the last dozen years, her focus has been on teaching.  At USF, she was among the first of faculty to take her teaching on-line, developing and teaching courses entirely on the internet.  She has published an on-line tutorial on plagiarism.

Eleanour’s role in the TXESS revolution is to develop and maintain the on-line learning community for and with participants.  Through our own portal, teachers will be able to communicate with each other, and with the Austin staff, to find new resources, to share their successes and challenges, and to maintain an active learning community between workshops.