Xena T. Dog provided field assistance, perspective, and spiritual guidance. Rest in peace, sweet girl.

Amir Sheikh assists in GIS based research with members of the Puget Sound River History Project, the Geomorphological Research Group (GRG), the Quaternary Research Center (QRC), and the Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model (PRISM) program. He is experienced in both geomorphologic and ecological applications of spatial analysis including a) historical landscape reconstruction b) landscape change analysis c) river channel migration zone mapping, and d) topographic analysis in fluvial environments. He also assists in the administration of SDE and ArcGIS map servers.

Amanda Henck's research focuses on erosion in the Three Rivers Region in southwest China and southeast Tibet. She has measured basin wide erosion rates with Be-10 in detrital sediments and used those rates to investigate spatial controls on erosion over longer timescales - can we make predictions of erosion rates using mean annual rainfall, stream power, mean local relief, and/or tectonic activity? Using daily sediment yield and discharge data for a network of stations in the region she calculated short-term erosion rates and compared those with the long-term rates and same spatial predictors of erosion to determine if short-term erosion rates have the same controls as long term rates. She also is using the short term rates to look at anthropogenic effects on erosion in the region. Recently she has also become interested in scaling issues related to calculations using measured discharge and sediment yield data.

Aside from her dissertation research, Amanda has been part of an interdisciplinary program called Challenges to the Environment. Through that program she studied abroad at Sichuan University during the 2005-2006 academic year and was the TA/site director for a UW undergraduate program at that school. During that year she conducted field work for her dissertation and also led an environmental science field course for high school students. As a participant in the IGERT she has been involved in two interdisciplinary research projects. The first is at Jiuzhaigou National Park, Sichuan, China and is a study of hillslope terraces which are a natural result of human occupation and have been key to extending the known human occupation of the park from 300 years to as much as 3000 years. The second is a resilience study in Yangjuan, a small minority village in southern Sichuan in which a team is looking at social and ecosystem resilience in light of recent policy changes related to forest management.

Amanda hopes to finish her PhD this fall and will be returning to China on a Fulbright Fellowship in February, 2010 to continue work on the hillslope terraces in Jiuzhaigou National Park.

Sanjoy Som studies planetary geomorphology, and more specifically planetary environments, where he is particularly interested in their potential habitability, but also in their geologic, geomorphic and atmospheric evolution (which are intertwined). For Mars, he is looking at the downstream variation of different valley networks to see if any trends exist (or not). In any case, he hopes to extract information on whether or not they were carved by precipitation of liquid water or if other mechanisms are dominant. This will obviously have repercussions on their environment of formation. Furthermore, he just recently began thinking about the evolution of the Tharsis region and Vallis Marineris, and how a larger genetic relationship than previously thought might exist between their evolution and the Hesperian outflow channels.