GeoFORCE Speakers and Presenters at GSA Connects 2025
November 7, 2025
GeoFORCE Texas staff and alumni had the pleasure of attending, presenting, and supporting our peers throughout GSA Connects 2025, the flagship meeting of The Geological Society of America. As this year’s conference was only a short drive from Austin, GeoFORCE was able to have a big presence at the event.
GeoFORCE Staff Presentations
All of the GeoFORCE Coordinators did oral presentations during the conference. Both Senior Program Coordinator Mitchel Lambert and Communications Coordinator Jasmine “Jas” Atobajeun had presentations in the Geoscience Outreach Efforts to Broaden Participation session. Mitchel’s talk was titled Importance of Relationships in Youth STEM Programming and was shared by Jennifer Peña on his behalf. This highlighted how GeoFORCE implements relationship building in our summer programs and the positive outcomes that follow. Jas presented on how GeoFORCE is able to provide our amazing, hands-on geoscience learning experience to our students by explaining the roles our coordinators have throughout the year.
For the Diversifying Geoscience Education Across the Academic Playing Field session, Jennifer Peña, our Alumni Coordinator, focused on the switch from test based to project based curriculum for the GeoFORCE 9th, 10th, and 11th grade summer academies. Eleanor Cote, our Digital Media Coordinator, had a talk during this session as well titled Using Project-Based Learning to Foster Creativity and Interest in the Geosciences. Eleanor explained how studies have shown that student agency increases engagement and interest in education content. On our 12th Grade Academy, we encourage student agency in choosing a project and have seen an increase in interest in students’ chosen sub-field of geosciences.
Jasmine Gulick, GeoFORCE Texas Operations Manager, also spoke about the 12th Grade Academy in her presentation titled Using Small-Group Research Projects to Build Data Analytic Skills in High School Seniors. Jasmine’s presentation was about how we build confidence in STEM and research through the research project based 12th Grade Academy. She went on to discuss the success we have seen in the number of students going into the geosciences since switching to this style in 2023.
Alumni Presentations and Participation
Kathryn Stone is currently a 4th-year geoscience undergraduate. She presented a poster at GSA titled Hot or Not?: Metamorphosed Chondrules In CV Chondrite Camel Donga 003 As Evidence For Varying Degrees of Metamorphism Within The Parent Body. “My GSA experience this year was fantastic!” Kathryn said. “It was my first time attending and presenting at a large conference since going to AGU with GeoFORCE four years ago, and it was such a great experience getting to share some of my senior research with so many people. I learned so much during this conference that I have already gotten to apply back at school, which has been really neat, and I can’t wait to go back next year”.
Isabel Johnson, a 2nd-year geoscience masters student, did an oral presentation on mixed carbonate-siliciclastic deposits found in the Desmoinesian Strawn Group. She shared more information about her presentation with us and explained that “the subsurface Strawn Group in north-central Texas is known to be a good oil and gas reservoir of mixed carbonate siliciclastic deposits. The facies of these deposits are known to contain complex interactions between many different depositional environments in which the lateral extents are not well constrained. In order to decrease risk within these fields, [her] project aims to better understand the lateral extents of mixed carbonate-siliciclastic deposits by correlating drill core and wireline logs, as well as incorporating an outcrop analog from the Bug Scuffle Member in the Sacramento Mountains to further understand facies architectures”.
A 2nd-year geoscience undergraduate, Angelina Wangler, presented a poster titled Accessing Barge Transport for CO2 in the Texas Gulf and discussed how barges could be an alternative for the most common way to transport CO2, pipelines. Two additional GeoFORCE alumni, Jessica Valdez and Dr. Hector Garza, were also in attendance, supporting their peers within the geoscience community.
GeoFORCE Faculty and Student Presentations
For the Planetary Exploration and Education session, Dr. Timothy Goudge, Assistant Professor under the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Jackson School of Geosciences, spoke about how GeoFORCE Texas teaches planetary geology during our 12th grade academy. Dr. Goudge was a research mentor during the academy this past summer. He led our students in the Drone Surveying of Coastline Change project where students collected data along the Gulf Coast in Clute, Texas.
Sierra Mickler, a high school student who participated in the GeoFORCE 12th Grade Academy this past summer, presented a poster on a student’s perspective to laboratory research experiences. She will also be presenting more details about her research at AGU25 this year.
Looking Ahead to AGU25
Speaking of AGU, the American Geophysical Union, this December we will be taking 25 GeoFORCE students to participate in the Bright STaRS program at the AGU Annual Meeting, AGU25. These students were participants in our 12th Grade Academy and presented their research projects at our annual symposium. Because of the amazing job they all did on these projects, they were nominated and selected to represent GeoFORCE at the largest geoscience conference in the world hosted in New Orleans, Louisiana this year!
You can find more information on how you can attend and support our students here, https://www.agu.org/annual-meeting.
If you are a GeoFORCE alum or affiliate and planning to attend the AGU25 conference, please let us know. We would love the opportunity to connect and show our support for your work! If you would like to learn more about any of the topics mentioned in this article, we would be glad to connect you with the presenter.
Read more about all of the GSA Connects 2025 presenters from the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin here, https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2025/10/jackson-school-speakers-and-presenters-at-gsa-25/.
