2024 Advancing Excellence

Welcome to Advancing Excellence, from Dean Claudia Mora

Dear Friends and Alumni of the Jackson School,

We have had a truly tremendous year at the Jackson School of Geosciences! Faculty in all of our units are engaged in important and newsworthy research and our students are finding success in their academic and career endeavors. This fall, the Jackson School officially became a partner in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Energy Center, which will open many learning and networking opportunities for students interested in all things energy.

Thanks to the generosity of so many of you, the energetic leadership of our Chief Development Officer Andrew West, and the efforts of our dedicated development and alumni relations team, the Jackson School just wrapped its second-most successful fundraising year in the School’s history, raising just over $30 million! A third of that represents in-kind corporate donations of cutting-edge tools and instrumentation. This team is making remarkable strides as we enter the final stretch of the What Starts Here campaign. I feel confident that, with your help, we will significantly exceed our What Starts Here campaign goal.

This past spring, we focused our “40 Hours for the Forty Acres” crowdfunding campaign on a new building at the White Family Outdoor Learning Center to serve as a classroom and staging site for the wide range of research and educational activities happening on the property. I am thrilled to share that we raised more than $850,000 for the improvements and have already started the design and construction processes for the new facility. I hope to share pictures with all of you next year!

We continue to see significant undergraduate enrollment increases in our core GEO programs. Undergraduate majors are up 8% over Fall 2023 and 48% over Fall 2022, with many students attracted to our interdisciplinary environmental science program. We launched a new Climate System Science major this Fall to flesh out options in General Geology, Geophysics and Hydrology. The world needs geoscientists to address the energy and natural resource demands of the future, to improve prediction of environmental changes, natural hazards and climate change impacts, and to enable resilience and sound decision-making in the face of all of these challenges. We are committed to offering the best possible education for all of our students and to enabling their future leadership.

Working together, the future of the school is bright! I hope you will or join us for our 20th Anniversary of the Jackson School event in April 2025. Stay connected with us and let us know your story! Join us for a coffee, a football game or a campus visit. We truly appreciate all you do to support the Jackson School, our students, faculty and programs!

Hook ‘em!

Claudia Mora, Dean