Alumni Spotlight: Dante Angelo Tarzona

January 14, 2022

This December 2021, GeoFORCE Coordinator John Hash stood in front of the GeoFORCE poster at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference. For several hours, a steady stream of participants walked over to the poster to hear about the GeoFORCE Program. Halfway through the session, a young Ph.D. student from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) walked up. Hash began to explain the program, then stopped as he recognized the student.

Dante Angelo Tarzona didn’t need a primer on GeoFORCE. After all, he was a student of the program half-a-decade ago. John Hash was his coordinator on the fateful trip when Tarzona was about to enter 10th grade and GeoFORCE took him on a hike down the Grand Canyon.

“It’s like traveling back in time,” Tarzona said. “It really made me curious about Earth’s processes and geologic history.”

A few years later, Tarzona enrolled at Dickinson College as an earth sciences major. There, he was a member of the earth science club, a mentor at GeoPATHS field camp, and a co-mentor of MANdatory, a safe-space for first-year men of color. He also did a work-study for the Alliance of Aquatic Resource Monitoring as a watershed coordinator.

Now, Tarzona is a first-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech researching 1960s – 70s archival airborne radar echo sounding data on the Ross Ice Shelf.

“This research provides baseline information of subglacial structure at Ross Ice Shelf,” Tarzona said. “And can be calibrated to compare with modern airborne radar echo sounding data that can help us understand multi-decadal changes.”

To Tarzona, the research he’s doing is one of the coolest projects he’s been able to work on yet, but his favorite part is being allowed to mentor an undergraduate researcher in his group.

“I get to learn how to be a mentor and go over glaciological terms to my mentee,” Tarzona said. “And there are upcoming opportunities in our group for outreach, teaching about glacial retreat or sea level rise in local school districts of Atlanta.”

After receiving his doctorate, Tarzona hopes to pursue a postdoctoral degree or become a resident field-glaciologist somewhere in the Arctic or Antarctica. He also plans to join an organization or two that focuses on inspiring future geoscientists.