The program has an energetic and exceptionally productive core of award winning young faculty and a distinguished senior faculty, many of whom are repeatedly tapped for university administrative roles and leadership in national and international research initiatives. The program is further strengthened by a superb technical staff, a gifted long-term lecturer, several additional skilled lecturers, and a very capable administrative staff. The program has excellent teaching and research facilities provided by the relatively new Earth and Marine Sciences Building.
All faculty currently have external funding and active graduate programs.
In addition, there are particularly strong intersections with the UCSC Ocean Sciences Department, the Institute of Tectonics, and the Institute of Marine Sciences, which extend the teaching, research and analytic facilities available to the Earth Sciences program. There is a strong tradition of sharing analytic facilities within the program as well as with colleagues in Ocean Sciences, IMS and Tectonics. The Department's workload and number of majors have both increased steadily over the past 4 years, resisting the trend of almost all other programs in the Natural Sciences Division during that period. Earth Sciences Department Self Study provides extensive information about the program that should be reviewed when assessing this Strategic Plan. As the campus envisions the next ten years of expansion and cultivation of centers of excellence, our contention is that the Earth Sciences Department is critically poised to make a major stride forward into top-ranked stature in the nation by early in the new millennium.