Caltech geoscientist named Guggenheim Fellow

PASADENA—Joann Stock, an authority on plate tectonics and a professor of geology and geophysics at the California Institute of Technology, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced. Stock joins 184 other artists, scholars, and scientists this year for the prestigious honor, which is now in its 80th year. A member of the Caltech faculty since 1992, Stock came from Harvard University where she was an associate professor. She also holds an adjunct appointment at the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (the Center of Scientific Investigation and Higher Education of Ensenada) in Baja California, Mexico, and is a former employee of the U.S. Geological Survey office at Menlo Park, California. Her research interests include plate tectonics, structural geology, evolution of plate boundaries, physical volcanology, remote sensing, ground-penetrating radar studies of active faults, and stress and deformation in the lithosphere. The Guggenheim Fellowship has been awarded to Stock for a project on the comparative tectonic history of two rift basins: the Sea of Japan and the Gulf of California. The grant will help to support Stock's sabbatical research on this topic, which she plans to conduct next academic year in Japan and in Mexico. The goal of the project is to better understand the ways in which ocean basins can result from stretching of continental lithosperic plates. Stock will be working in collaboration with scientists from the University of Tokyo and from the University of Sonora for the studies in Japan and in Mexico, respectively.

The Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Each year, the new recipients are appointed on the basis of recommendations from expert advisors and are approved by the foundation's board of trustees. This year's total award funding for the 185 new recipients is $6,912,000. The 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards were announced April 8 in New York by foundation president Edward Hirsch.