Tuesday, October 28, 2003

By: Christin Ingold, PR Intern

WILMINGTON, NC- Patricia Kelley, professor in the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Department of Earth Science, will receive the 2003 Association for Women Geoscientists Foundation (AWGF) Outstanding Educator Award at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle, Wash. on Nov. 3.

Kelley is a paleontologist whose interests include modes and rates of evolutionary change and origin of macro evolutionary patterns, which she investigates using Coastal Plain mollusks. In addition to being a professor and the past departmental chair at UNCW, she is a senior author of over 30 refereed papers, past-president of the UNCW Paleontology Society and the mother of two children.

Kelley attended the College of Wooster as an undergraduate. She then went to Harvard to obtain her Ph.D. At Harvard, Kelley studied under Steven Jay Gould, who directed her interest to the field of teaching. She began her teaching career at the University of Mississippi where she was the first and only woman in the School of Engineering.

Unlike many academics who spend their careers at a single institution, Kelley has been on the faculty at three different universities. After two years at the National Science Foundation as program director for Geology and Paleontology and Geological Record of Global Change, she accepted the position of professor and chair of the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at the University of North Dakota. In 1997, she left North Dakota to accept a position at UNCW.

Kelley’s passion for teaching comes from interactions with her students and the opportunity for her to continue to learn. Of her career she says, “It’s hard to imagine a career that would allow me to use my talent and have so much fun at the same time.”

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For more information, contact Pranoti M. Asher at 912/681-0338 or Patricia Kelley at 910/962-7406 or kelleyp@uncw.edu.