Geology professor ROCKS

by Mike Stepanovich

CSUB geology professor Rob Negrini watches as the core sample from Buena Vista lakebed is pulled to the surface. Negrini has been leading a summer program with colleague Dirk Baron to learn more about the ancient climates of the southern San Joaquin Valley by studying the layers of sediment put down over centuries by the Kern River.

Students crowd around as he examines the core and points out this feature and that one. He happily answers questions and encourages the students to think of more.

It's hot, but Negrini is oblivious. He's in his element - conducting valuable research and teaching students at the same time. It's something he loves.

And it's something he dreamed about doing as a boy growing up in western Massachusetts. "I grew up in a small town where there was a lot of outdoor activity - hiking, fishing. I knew I wanted to be a science major, so I started in physics. But I gravitated toward geology because of the outdoor activity."

He earned his bachelor's degree in Physics and Geology from Amherst College, a small, liberal arts school. "The campus in western Massachusetts was under two miles of ice 15,000 years ago, and Cape Cod and Long Island were piles of dirt left behind by this ice. People were painting caves in Europe then," he said, describing the Ice Age. "Learning about that, that's when I was hooked."

A summer field trip to Montana during his Amherst days further sold him on geology. He loved the different strata, learning about volcanic rock and sedimentary rock, and that geology helped him come to grips with - literally - the planet's history and how it formed.

When it came time for graduate school, he was offered teaching and research opportunities at both UC Davis and University of Massachusetts. He chose Davis "because I wanted to see the West. I'd heard about the beaches and mountains, so of course here I am in the San Joaquin Valley.

After completing his doctorate, he came to CSUB in the fall 1985. "I had three job offers," he recalled, "the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of New Orleans and CSUB. I choose CSUB for two reasons: one, I had met a California girl who became my wife (Jana), and two because of John Coash, then Dean of the former School of Arts and Sciences. He convinced me that CSUB was as close to a liberal arts school as you could come in a public university setting. That attracted me."

He stays, he said, because "I landed in a department with incredibly talented colleagues who are easy to work with and very good but have too few students."

Negrini thinks of himself as "a jack of all trades" in the physics and geology fields. He teaches both, after "starting as a paleo-magnetist, one who studies the Earth's magnetic field. I morphed into a paleoclimatologist and a geomorphologist, someone who studies landscapes and how they are formed." That interest led him to study the Tulare Basin and the landscapes of the San Joaquin Valley.

He's also explored the eastern Oregon deserts, and has another research project going on the Mojave Desert not far from Baker.

And while his scholarly endeavors excite him, he's really committed to teaching, to sharing what he learns with his students, and helping them learn through their own research. "I love teaching classes to engaged students and publishing peer-reviewed research with the students. One of them really stood out - an undergraduate named Carol Register tested a theory that one of my graduate students (Sam Zic) came up with - how weather in the North Atlantic Ocean affects rainfall in western North America. She presented her findings at the International Geological Congress of 2004, a meeting that only convenes once every four years, this time in Florence, Italy. She was one of the few undergraduates at the meeting.

"I get excited when I find students like her. My role is to give them a chance, and help them take advantages of the opportunities available to them. And pay for geology graduates is at the top of the sciences, oil boom or not. Nobody seems to get that because earth science is not taught at the public schools as much as it should be. Hopefully that will change - the new California standards require earth science be taught more than ever in the public schools.

Negrini sees his future as working to build the department and to build a knowledge of earth science in the community. "My main goals for the school are to increase the number of geology majors, and to increase the number of school teachers who have expertise in earth science. And I want to mentor the new earth science faculty, because I was treated so well when I came here. It's a very supporting department, and I want to complete that cycle."

But he always comes back to teaching. "I love teaching. I look at my job as 50 percent teaching, 35 percent scholarly activity and 15 percent service to the campus and the community. That's an ideal mix. I tend to err on the side of a little more research and a little less service, but teaching is what I enjoy the most.

However,"Peer reviewed research is necessary to maintain a legitimacy of expertise. As the saying goes, research is to teaching like sin is to confession: if you don't partake in the former, you have nothing to say in the latter."