Rock, paper ... editor

"I found my life's work and love at JMU," says Carl N. Drummond ('88). First he discovered geology, then his wife, Natalie Prince Drummond ('90), also a geology major.

"I enrolled at JMU with the intention of pursuing a career in business," Drummond says. "I took a few geology classes and became hooked. JMU, and specifically Dr. Lynn Fichter had a huge impact on my development as a scientist and as an educator."

Drummond is editor of the internationally distributed Journal of Geoscience Education and is a professor at Indiana Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Ind.

The journal, published five times a year, has a circulation of about 3,500 and is the only internationally distributed journal dedicated to teaching geoscience. As official publication of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the journal prints 500 to 600 pages per year.
Drummond was selected in 1999 to succeed Jim Shea, who was the editor for 25 years. After receiving his doctorate in 1994 from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Drummond went to work for Indiana Purdue. He's been named a Geological Society of America fellow and was awarded the James Lee Wilson medal by the Society for Sedimentary Geology for excellence in sedimentary geology. He also earned two research grants from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.
One of Drummond's research papers was selected as the best paper published in the 1996 Journal of Sedimentary Research. In sum, he has published 26 research papers and 46 research abstracts with presentations. His research has focused on the bed thickness relationships and high-resolution stratigraphic architecture of sedimentary rocks. In other words, he looks at the relationship between time and rock thickness. "My current research focuses on the Ordovician Kope Formation of northern Kentucky, a succession of fossil-rich rocks deposited during major storms on an ancient marine shelf," he says.

Drummond and his wife have a son, Ashby Drummond, 3, who is named after his great-great grandfather, Turner Ashby Drummond, who had been named after Gen. Turner Ashby. Drummond lived in Ashby Hall for two years and says he tries to get back to JMU whenever he can.

Story by Donna Dunn ('94)