Gina Oliver joined Rensselaer in 2014 and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences under the advising of Dr. Karyn Rogers. She transferred from Chaffey College with an A.A. in Religious Studies to California State University, Long Beach to finish her B.S. in Geology in 2014. Gina was on the Dean's Honor List while she was at Chaffey and received a Departmental Honors Award from CSULB in 2014.
Gina started at RPI in the Fall 2014 as a research assistant in the Habitability and Extreme Life Lab focusing on high-pressure geomicrobiology, specifically on the role of high-pressure on deep-sea vent microbial growth, metabolism and physiological response. Alongside research, Gina completed RPI’s Professional Leadership Series and actively participates in graduate and STEM informational webinars through RPI’s graduate recruitment team. As a member of the School of Science Graduate Student Council, Gina hopes to develop a series of workshops run by graduate students for undergraduates to focus on undergraduate research opportunities, graduate life and graduate research experiences.
Previously, Gina finished the USDA Watershed Management Internship in March 2015, working on an independent research project measuring the rate at which fuels and soils dry after precipitation in the San Dimas Experimental Forest (SDEF), CA by creating a prototype soil and fuel data logger constructed using Arduino technology. Additional undergraduate research included a summer internship in Boulder, CO for the Research Experience in Solid Earth Sciences for Students (RESESS) which focused on the splitting of teleseismic shear waves to image asthenospheric flow under the southern Sierra Nevada, California to locate discontinuity in regional pattern of upper mantle seismic anisotropy. The results contributed to a larger effort to better understand continental crust preservation. Lastly, her first opportunity to conduct original research came in the spring of 2012 as an undergraduate laboratory assistant for Dr. Lora Stevens at CSULB handling lake core sediments from Iran and Vietnam where she extracted delicate ostracod microfossils from these cores for carbon and oxygen stable isotope signature analysis to look at paleoclimate variability.