This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Charles Ver Straten of the Center for Stratigraphy and Paleontology at New York State Museum will kick off this year’s Geology Department Seminar Series with a lecture on “Mud, Sand, and Mountains: Looking at Sedimentary Rocks, Seeing Tectonics,” noon tomorrow in 108 Van Wickle Hall.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided free of charge to students and for $3 to faculty and staff.
An adjunct professor in the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at SUNY-Albany, Ver Straten curates the New York State Museum’s stratigraphic and paleontologic collections. He conducts independent research on regional aspects of Devonian dynamic stratigraphy with emphases in cyclic and episodic, tectonic, or eustatic controls on sedimentation and biotas; and regional to global Devonian stratigraphic synthesis.
Ver Straten earned a Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences and master’s in geological sciences from University of Rochester, and a bachelor’s degree from Empire State College, New York.
The Center for Stratigraphy and Paleontology has two primary responsibilities: to conserve and make accessible the extensive subsurface and fossil collections of New York State Museum, and to conduct basic research on the stratigraphic record and history of life in New York and collateral regions.
The center was created by New York State Museum in 1999 to continue a number of functions of the New York State Geologic Survey. These include: assuring access to and permanent conservation of two large collections — the roughly one million specimens of the Paleontology Collection and the Subsurface Collection; continuing and completing original research on the history and evolution of life and on the local and global controls (e.g., climate, sea-level changes, plate tectonic processes) responsible for deposition and preservation of the sedimentary rock record; disseminating information on the history of life and ancient environments through “deep time”; and documenting the contributions of people involved in early paleontologic research in New York.