The Sedimentary Research Group is led by Dr. Jeannette Wolak, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Tennessee Tech University. Dr. Wolak’s research focuses on sedimentary processes and how depositional environments migrate through time and space. Prior to joining the faculty at TTU, she worked in the Upstream Technology division at Marathon Oil Corporation in Houston, Texas. There, she specialized in integrating outcrop and subsurface datasets: cores, wireline logs, 2D and 3D seismic. Her favorite datasets were high-resolution 3D seismic cubes from offshore Equatorial Guinea, the North Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico.
At TTU, Wolak researches sedimentary processes operating on Earth and other rocky bodies in the Solar System. She is presently focused on the geologic history of Mars and works with senior thesis students to understand how sedimentary deposits record ancient climate and tectonic cycles on the Red Planet. Wolak applied twice to be an Astronaut Candidate (no luck, yet!), and she enjoys being a part-time Martian through data analysis and geologic mapping of the Xanthe Terra and Aeolis Mensae regions.
Wolak teaches 2-3 courses per semester and advises thesis projects that focus on sedimentary geology, stratigraphy, petroleum geology and planetary geology. Her courses include: GEOL 1040 (Physical Geology), GEOL 2500 (Geologic Fundamentals), GEOL 3310 (Planetary Geoscience), GEOL 4110 (Sedimentation and Stratigraphy) and GEOL 4200 (Geologic Exploration Techniques).
When she isn’t in the classroom or the field, she is (probably) knitting.
Sedimentary Research Group 