Over the last five years, numerous students have assisted Professor Lyzenga with the Eastern San Gabriel GPS Geodesy Project. The following people have taken part in furthering the understanding of crustal deformation in Southern California.




Principal Investigator, Gregory A. Lyzenga (1975), Assoc. Prof. Web Page

Jennifer Chalfan (2000) Web Page

• Jennifer is currently a junior physicist residing in South Dorm, where she holds the lofty and envied position of South Dorm Tree-tender. While not studying for her exciting classes, Jennifer enjoys soccer, horseback riding, karate, running, painting, standing out in the rain, and avoiding badgers. Her favorite vegetables are broccoli and artichokes, and her coolest item of clothing is her yellow rain hat.

• Jason Burt is a co-president of North Dorm, a devoted Simpsons fan, and a certified loony. He does a great Jerky Boys impersonation.

• While studying physics at Harvey Mudd, Wendy's main research project was to work on a program that inverts surface deformation data (like GPS) to give a picture of the underlying faults. When the project is complete, Wendy's program will allow us to enter our data and then give us the geometry and the slip rates of the faults.
• Wendy is currently a grad student at UC Berkeley, working in high pressure mineral physics in the geophysics department. She is working on two projects, one of which is to constrain when a subducting slab might melt as it penetrates the mantle. To do this, she uses an apparatus called a laser-heated diamond anvil cell, which can achieve very high pressures and tempuratures (up to 100 GPa and 6000K), to subject a rock representative of a slab to pressures and tempuratures comparable to those found in the mantle. Her second project involves looking at pressure dependent chemical partitioning of trace elements between mantle and core materials.

• S. Ben Melhuish, better known as Sben, majored in physics with an emphasis in geophysics and a humanities concentration in history. Sben did his senior research with Professor Lyzenga in the first year of the geodesy project. Sben was president of North Dorm and JB chair. After his graduation in 1994, he worked as a programmer for LaserFiche, a small company near Torrance, CA. He recently left LaserFiche and traveled in Europe for 6 weeks, and is now moving to Seattle, WA. In his spare time, Sben enjoys microbrewing and swing dancing.
• Sben can be reached at Sben@alumni.hmc.edu.