The 21st Century has brought a profusion of online databases for structural geologists, stratigraphers, and field geologists in general. Increasingly, our students are confronted with this flood of numbers and it is incumbent upon us to teach them the quantitative skills they will need in order to take advantage of this digital bounty. The National Science Foundation (Tectonics program) has graciously agreed to support a summer school to take place over two summers with the purpose of training instructors of structural geology in quantitative methods.

The year 1 course, Teaching Structural Geology Lab Using Vectors and Basic Linear Algebra, was taught in Summer 2024.

Year 2: TBA — Watch for Announcements

We will probably offer both the course we taught in year 1 (taught Rick Allmendinger and Basil Tikoff), and the year 2 Statistics in Structural geology course, taught by Josh Davis and Sarah Titus, in summer 2025. The year 1 course is on teaching structure lab using basic vector operations and linear algebra. For background, nothing more than a year of college math is assumed. All computation can be done in spreadsheets unless the attendee is more comfortable with a more advanced language. Attendees must bring their own laptops and a phone or tablet with which to collect field data. Lectures and exercises will be interspersed with field excursions where attendees can collect and upload their data to the StraboSpot database to be used later in class exercises.

How to apply & Financial Support

Watch this space

Who should apply?

Preference will be given to structural geology professors in the first half of their career as well as post-docs and senior grad students who are committed to an academic career. It is expected that attendees will make a good faith effort to apply what they learn in the summer school in their teaching of structural geology classes.

Online resources

It is our intention to put many of the resources used for this short course online, so that the materials and instructional videos are available to those unable to attend. If there is demand and sufficient funds, we will consider running this course again in 2025.

Why Two Courses?

The two courses are independent of each other and one does not have to take the “teaching structure lab using vectors and basic linear algebra” in order to take “statistics in structural geology”. The math from the first course will get a workout in the second course!