UMD News Releases

The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) will hold graduate program commencement ceremonies Thursday, May 13 at 7 p.m. in the Romano Gymnasium on the UMD campus. Graduate degrees will be conferred upon 120 candidates, including one Ph.D. Featured speaker will be Erik T. Brown, UMD associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and the Large Lakes Observatory.

Dr. Brown received his A.B. in chemistry from Princeton University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1990. He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at Woods Hole from 1985 to 1988, an NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellow in France, and for three years he held a permanent research post at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

In 1995, he joined the faculty at UMD, and he was the recipient of the 2002-03 Chancellor?s Award for Distinguished Research. During 2000 2001, he was a Fulbright Scholar in France.

His research interests include paleoclimate records preserved in lake sediments and development of new climate proxies for paleolimnology, biogeochemistry of trace metals and nutrients in lakes, and the use of cosmogenic nuclides for quantitative examination of surface processes including erosion, landscape evolution, glacial history and neotectonics. In addition to his research in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Dr. Brown has undertaken fieldwork in Mongolia, Burkina Faso, Zaire, Uganda, Congo, Malawi, China, India, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Turkey and France.