Terry Jordan
Professor Emerita and Principal Investigator
Teresa Jordan completed a B.S. in December 1974 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in June 1979 from Stanford University, both in Geology. She joined Cornell in 1979 in a research position, and joined the faculty in 1984. From 2003-2008 she was the Chair of Cornell University’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. During 2001-2003, she was Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs in the Engineering College at Cornell. In 2005, Professor Jordan received the Lawrence Sloss award of the Sedimentary Geology division of the Geological Society of America. In 2008 she was named the J. Preston Levis Professor of Engineering. In 2014 she was name a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and she is the 2021 William F Twenhofel Medal awardee of SEPM the Society for Sedimentary Geology. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a Corresponding Member of the Asociación Geológica Argentina.
Lester Olivares
Ph.D. Student
Lester Olivares, a Chilean Geologist, finished his undergrad at Universidad Catolica del Norte (UCN) in 2016. He completed his thesis: “The configuration of the forearc of northern Chile between 18.5°S – 24°S: A vision from the landscape evolution modeling” under the supervision of Dr. Rodrigo Riquelme (UCN) and Dr. Sebastien Carretier (Toulouse University). After, he worked as supervisor of the digitalization of the urban map of Antofagasta for the Architecture Department of UCN and as a lecturer for the Department of Geological Sciences of UCN teaching principles of Geology for students in the Engineering program. In June 2017, Lester was awarded a scholarship by Becas Chile which is the scholarship that allows him to study at Cornell University. Since January of 2018, he started his Ph.D. study under the supervision of Dr. Teresa Jordan working on the influence of extreme rain events in the landscape evolution of the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, over different time scales. Lester uses different approaches such as remote sensors, detailed stratigraphy, Structure from Motion technique, and Quantitative Geomorphology.