Dr. John (Jack) F. Shroder received his bachelor’s degree in geology from Union College in 1961; his masters in geology from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst in 1963, and his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Utah in 1967. He has been actively pursuing research on landforms and natural resources in the high mountain environments of the Rocky Mountains, the Afghanistan Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan for over a half century. His teaching specialties have been primarily geomorphology, but also physical and historical geology and several other courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he was the founding professor of the Geology major. While there he was instrumental in founding the Center for Afghanistan Studies in 1972, and he was the lead geologist for the Bethsaida Archaeological Project in Israel in the 1990s. He taught geology as an NSF-, USAID, and Fulbright-sponsored professor at Kabul University in 1977-78, as well as a Fulbright award to Peshawar University in 1983-84. He has some 63 written or edited books to his credit and more than 200 professional papers, with emphases on landslides, glaciers, flooding, and mineral resources in Afghanistan. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received Distinguished Career awards from both the Mountain and the Geomorphology Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers. In the recent decade as an Emeritus Professor, he served as a Trustee of the Geological Society of America Foundation where he set up a research scholarship, the Shroder Mass Movement award for masters and doctoral candidates. For the past two decades, he has been the Editor-in-Chief for the Developments in Earth Surface Processes book series of Elsevier Publishing, as well as the 10-volumes of the Treatise on Geomorphology, and the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters book series, both in second editions. Recently, Dr. Shroder was ranked among the top 2 percent of researchers worldwide by the October study conducted by Stanford University. Jean Taylor Ellis is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of South Carolina. She is interested in coastal and aeolian geomorphology and the impact of humans on the coastal environment. She and her students approach research from a field and instrument-intensive perspective and work with community members to bridge the gap between science and the public. Dr. Ellis has published over 30 scholarly articles, is on the editorial board of international journals (including Elsevier’s Aeolian Research), and was a Fulbright Scholar. Douglas Sherman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. His research interests are in coastal and aeolian geomorphology and sedimentation. He has published more than one hundred scholarly articles, and edited volumes of the Treatise on Geomorphology on Coastal Geomorphology and Aeolian Geomorphology, and co-edited Coastal and Marine Hazards, Risks and Disasters. Much of his recent research involves human impacts on coastal sedimentation and the physics of sediment transport, especially wind-blown sand. He is an AAAS Fellow and has twice been a Fulbright Senior Scholar.
