Boyce Chair in Geological Sciences

During my second appointment as the Boyce Chair (2020-2025), your support has enabled me to push the boundaries of geological science in exciting new directions. Beyond achieving traditional academic milestones - like mentoring 10 graduate students to graduation, securing over $1 million in external funding, and being promoted to Full Professor - the Boyce Chair has allowed me to pioneer innovative approaches, such as drone-based lidar, to studying Earth's processes.

By combining traditional field observations with satellite technology and advanced computing, we've made fundamental discoveries about how rivers behave and shape our landscape. This work has garnered international recognition, leading to six keynote/invited addresses where I've had the opportunity to share how Indiana University is advancing our understanding of Earth's surface processes. These achievements reflect not just my work, but the collaborative environment your support has fostered.

Support from the Boyce Chair has been instrumental in enabling research breakthroughs that advance both fundamental science and societal needs. Recently, my team made a discovery, published in Nature, that solves an 80-year-old mystery about why rivers suddenly change course. By analyzing 174 river shifts worldwide using satellite technology, we've developed the first predictive model for these catastrophic events. This work is particularly meaningful because it helps protect vulnerable communities - for instance, a single river shift in India affected over 30 million people and caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Published Research

Your support also enabled another breakthrough, published in Nature Sustainability, that transformed our understanding of Louisiana's coastal land loss crisis. While previous work blamed upstream dams for reducing river sediment, we discovered that levee construction and oil and gas extraction account for 80% of the land loss. This finding has immediate implications for the $2.3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, suggesting it could be more effective than previously thought at rebuilding Louisiana's vanishing coastline.

We're also advancing fundamental geological understanding through work on ancient river deposits. By combining traditional fieldwork in the Morrison Formation of Utah and Colorado with satellite analysis of modern rivers and computational modeling, we've revealed how rivers systematically change their behavior as they flow from mountains. This work, published in Sedimentology and Geology, exemplifies how modern earth science can weave together careful field observations with advanced technology while maintaining the rigorous standards of traditional geology.

Secured External Funding

Your support through the Boyce Chair has enabled me to pursue three interconnected projects that exemplify my approach of combining careful field observations with innovative technology to understand how landscapes evolve:

My National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study of oxbow lakes represents a perfect example of this approach. When rivers bend and curve across floodplains, they sometimes create crescent-shaped water bodies when a river bend gets cut off from the main channel. While these lakes are incredibly important for wildlife habitat and can trap harmful pollutants, scientists don't fully understand how they form or why some river cutoffs become lakes while others don't. We're combining careful field measurements with computer models to test the idea that the angle at which a cutoff occurs is crucial in determining whether it becomes a lake. By studying oxbows along several rivers and measuring everything from water flow patterns to sediment buildup, we hope to predict where oxbow lakes will form and persist.

In another NSF project, we're using artificial intelligence to study how fallen trees shape forest landscapes. When trees fall in forests, they do more than just create gaps in the canopy - they actually help move soil down hillsides through a process called "tree throw," where toppled trees pull up soil with their root balls. We're using AI to automatically identify these distinctive pit and mound features in high-resolution topographic data collected by laser scanning. This helps us understand how factors like slope steepness and wind direction influence where trees are most likely to fall, crucial information for understanding both long-term landscape evolution and how forests might respond to increasing extreme weather events.

Finally, with funding from the USDA we're investigating how farming practices affect soil erosion in floodplain farms—agricultural fields next to rivers that flood regularly. While most people think of farm fields as flat surfaces where rain falls evenly, these areas often develop channels that concentrate water flow and can cause serious soil erosion, potentially threatening farm productivity. We're combining on-the-ground measurements during actual floods with computer modeling to predict how different farming choices (like what to plant and when) affect soil loss. Using repeated laser scanning of the entire state of Indiana, we're measuring how much soil is being lost from these channels. This work is particularly important as farming expands into these flood-prone areas to meet growing food demands.

Student Success

The most rewarding aspect of my position is working with talented, motivated students. This is why I primarily direct the Boyce Chair funds toward student support. Over the last five years, these funds have helped support 16 undergraduates, 10 graduate students, and 3 post-doctoral researchers. The funds have also enabled crucial equipment purchases, including a state-of-the-art drone-based lidar system that we use to make precise measurements of topography—the same system we recently used to document dam-break flooding destruction in Michigan.

The Boyce funds have been particularly valuable in enabling students to present their research and build professional networks at conferences. While this includes major domestic meetings like the Geological Society of America and American Geophysical Union, your support has been especially crucial for international conference participation. Students have presented at the International Conference of Fluvial Sedimentology in Italy and the River, Coastal, and Estuarine Morphodynamics Conference in Spain. These international experiences, which would not be possible without your generous support, have exposed students to diverse research perspectives and fostered valuable collaborations.

The students supported by the Boyce Chair have gone on to diverse and impressive careers across the geosciences. While my early-career students often joined major energy companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, more recent graduates have gravitated toward environmental consulting and academic research. Their achievements highlight the impact of your support.

Recent examples are particularly noteworthy. Dr. Harrison Martin secured a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, widely considered the world's premier institution for Earth Science. Jake Gearon, a current student, recently led a breakthrough study on river avulsions published in Nature. And Rebecca Caldwell, one of my first students, has built an exceptional career as an exploration geologist at Chevron while serving on the boards of several major geological organizations, including the Geological Society of America Foundation, American Geological Institute, and American Association of Petroleum Geology.