Week 1, Fall 2025 - Department Retreat, Service Work, TLF, Tori Update

August 18-23 was a busy week!

Monday the 18th was an all day department retreat at UVU's fancy cabin next to Sundance Ski Resort. It was great to see everyone. We discussed Dan Stephen's replacement position and the fact that we need a faculty that is a true sed/strat professor, especially since that is a huge employment area within the Geosciences, it would be a disservice to the students if we just said oh we can teach it with a Paleo-seismologist or a Paleo-Climate person (which we could). We acknowledged the possibility of finding overlap with either paleoclimate, hydrology, or basin tectonics, these would be seen as pluses. We also discussed near-term goals (5 years out) for the department and I think everyone was in agreement that we should focus on projects that can be collaborative between multiple faculty and multiple students, helping to train students with team work skills and building more cohesivity amongst our various programs. We also acknowledged that prioritizing department service and external service that benefits our department explicitly is to be prioritized over other types of service. 

Tuesday led to a surprise visit from my Dad who's flight delay from Chicago to Eugene led him to have a 10 hour lay over in Salt Lake City. I picked him up and took him home. We shared beers and discussed the his siblings and my cousins that he had been visiting in Chicago. He got to meet Badger for the first time and see Tori for the first time since 2022. Unfortunately Tori still had her cone on and it was quite hot! But we also went for a walk by the Provo River (it was 100 degrees, but we were in the riparian zone/shade, so it was about 88 feels like temperature. Then we picked up Debjani from her first evening class of the semester and had dinner at The Bayou and took him back to the airport. 

Wednesday we removed the Cone from Tori! She was so happy to be able to clean herself after two weeks!!! David Johnson sent me some of his excellent work on fault scarp profiles and rupture mapping of the TLF, I reviewed that and relayed what was missing. I also reviewed about 25 proposals for the grant reviewer panel I am serving on. I need to still re-review them, but I did an initial read and judgement on all of them. 

Wednesday/Thursday, we learned that Tori's cancer is what is called a Soft Tissue Spindle Cell Sarcoma. Potentially these can be pretty localized, but they can spread and her specific tumor was graded as a 3, which means that the cells were highly abnormal and had a high likelihood of spreading. Dr. B from Pet Medical Services relayed information from the oncology report, his discussions with a local oncologist and his observations from the removal of the tumor. He said, the good news is that the Tumor appeared to be 'very encased', meaning that he was able to easily separate it from the healthy normal muscle and ligaments, etc. Which was obvious to us because she has no ill effects from the surgery on her mobility. He said since we did the surgery within 2 months of noticing the tumor, it is possible it has not spread. The oncologist said if it is within a year of it starting it might not spread. We are pretty certain it is less than six months from when it started, maybe three months. Anyway, Tori has an appointment with an oncologist for September 5th. We will likely get some imaging to make sure there are no internal tumors (when it does spread it tends to spread to lungs and things like that). They may suggest some follow up radiation at the site if it appears to just be localized. We might agree to that. If they see something internal then they will likely suggest Chemo which we are not very likely to put her through. Fingers crossed!!!! 

Friday, I finalized all the figures for the TLF manuscript, Still need to complete a couple of the captions though and there is plenty of paper to write, still think I can finish this draft by the end of August! 

Today I reviewed the GE committee bylaws and sent my comments to the committee chair. I won't be able to make that committee meeting because of overlap with my grant review committee this coming week. 

Definitely worked about 30 hours this week. Also did two nice ~1 hour bike rides on Thursday and Friday. I ordered and received a new POC Cularis Helmet for the MTB, best reviewed helmet for impacts from the VTech lab.