Scholarship Awards Range from $3,250 to $6,500

Four University of Houston Earth and Atmospheric Sciences graduate students received Warren L. and Florence W. Calvert Memorial Scholarships from the Houston Geological Society. The scholarship fund, created in 1974 by the Calvert family, is directed “to assist worthy and needy geological students to pursue graduate studies in some branch of Economic Geology leading to a master’s or doctoral degree.”

Calvert Memorial Scholarship Recipients

Melanie Adelman

Adelman, a master’s student in geology, is working on her thesis research under Dr. Jiajia Sun (UH) and Dr. Jeffrey Yarus (Case Western). Her research entails the generation of subsurface earth models while under conditions of sparse data and missing values using classic statistics and geostatistical techniques. She is a student member of HGS, AAPG and IAMG. Adelman gave an oral presentation in mid-August at Penn State about missing values and sparse data in well logs.

Edgar Contreras

Contreras, a first year Ph.D. student, will be working with seismic and bathymetry data from Walvis Ridge, a hotspot seamount chain in the Atlantic Ocean. His mentor is Dr. William Sager. In 2018, Contreras received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to fund his undergraduate research. This summer, he interned at Fugro Marine USA.

Matthew Sexton

Sexton’s research is in the Pacific Ocean, exploring the nature and extent of Cretaceous period volcanic activity in the oldest part of the Pacific plate, using reflection seismic and bathymetry data. In fall 2018, he participated in a research cruise to the South Atlantic to study Rio Grande Rise, an oceanic plateau off the South American coast. This fall, he’ll be a part of a group returning to study its counterpart, Walvis Ridge. An M.S. student, Sexton has been an officer with the SEG Wavelets student organization the past two years. His mentor is Dr. William Sager.

Andrew Stearns

Stearns is working with Dr. Julia Wellner on his M.S. thesis to quantify a total sediment budget in the Houston-Galveston region during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. He was a member of the 2019 Imperial Barrel Award world championship team and intends to pursue a career in the petroleum industry. Additionally, Stearns will be the conference chair for the 2020 EAS Student Research Conference and will serve on the executive council for the AAPG Wildcatters student organization in the coming academic year.

About the Scholarship

Since its inception, the Calvert Scholarship Fund has awarded approximately $520,000 in scholarships. Each year, around 6-8 scholarships are awarded in amounts ranging from $3,250 to $6,500 per year. Applications for the scholarship, available to geology or geophysics graduate students, typically open from late April to early June.