EES Distinguished Speaker Series - Fall 2026

The Distinguised Speaker Series is the Department of
Earth and Environmental Sciences Weekly Seminar

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title	Host
September 4	Steven Loheide	University of Wisconsin, Madison	Dary Lecture: Trees are groundwater stakeholders Too	Anthony Kendall and Jay Zarnetske
September 18	Nita Sahai	University of Akron	Mineral-promoted prebiotic chemistry in the origins of life	Megan Elwood Madden
September 25	Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert	Arizona State University	Life in the atmosphere: exploring Earth’s largest potential ecosystem	Matt Schrenk
October 2	Michael A. Velbel	Michigan State University	From Earth to Mars: terrestrial analogs as a framework for interpreting Martian clay minerals and ancient Mars
October 9	Jianhua (Ginny) Gong	Indiana University	Microseismicity and fault slip of oceanic transform fault	Shawn Wei
October 30	Joe Moysiuk	Manitoba Museum	The Burgess Shale and the evolution of animal body plans	Katie Maloney
November 13	Gerard Schuster	University of Utah	Society of Exploration Geophysicists lecture: the good, the bad, and the ugly with AI in geosciences	Tyrone Rooney
December 4	Erin Todd	U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center	Transitional melting regimes in the Seventymile ophiolite: new constraints on late Paleozoic to early Mesozoic tectonics of the northern Cordillera	Tyrone Rooney

Date	Student	Event	Title	Time and Location
August 19	Emma Stolinas	MS Thesis Defense	Exploring career perceptions among first-year college students through drawings: implications for advising	11:00 AM and virtual only
September 4	Ella Cardoza	MS Thesis Defense	Under pressure: bacterial aggregation and adaptations to high pressure ocean world environments	10:00 AM in Natural Sciences Rm 304

Date	Speaker and Affiliation	Title	Host	Time and Location
October 15	Jenni Gibbons, Canadian Space Agency	Astronaut's experience as support on Artemis II	Patton Allison Memorial Lecture	4:30 PM in the MSU Multicultural Center