Oregon's REU Personal Statement

My goals under Oregon’s REU opportunity are, to improve my understand of sedimentary processes and water dynamics with hopes for applying this research to my future goals of researching water contamination processes. I want to work with Alan Mix’s research opportunity of looking into the accumulations of river discharge from flooding, and learn how to interpret the floods impact on the forams with a forensic like mind set. Researching forams through an altered sea floor and related this to past flooding would further our understanding between the relationships of floods with sedimentation supply rates and the available accumulation. Because I want to go into contamination, researching past flooding and its impact of the sea floor accumulation would give vital information into how to interpret and go about researching contamination’s affects …show more content…
Past accumulation rates on continental margins grabbed my attention, because researching sedimentology with a focus of the accumulation change due to geomorphology is the piece of the puzzle overlooked by myself a lot. Now I want to participate in your REU to gain experience and having the instinct to think of sedimentology in both a macro (plate motion) and micro (flooding) timescale would be a powerful tool. Working with Rob would not be to just get a new way of thinking about my own research but I want to work with him to also further understand how geomorphology impacts accumulation in river systems. My overall goals are to get a sense of how to conduct research the most productive way and to obtain a useful understanding of multiple water systems. Working under Alan Mix with flooding and foraminifera, Greg Wilson’s shore dynamics and new methods of experimentations, and Rob Wheatcroft’s accumulation factors, will give me that experience to conduct my own future research to fight water