FACULTY AWARD
Excellent Teaching Assistant Award 2018-19
"Teaching field geology entails imparting skills on how to unearth the missing puzzle pieces of a geologic problem, and how to assemble these pieces together to tell a story of Earth’s dynamic past."
After receiving his bachelor and master degrees from the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), Mr Cody Lee COLLEPS moved to Hong Kong in 2016 to pursue a PhD degree under the supervision of Dr Ryan MCKENZIE in the Department of Earth Sciences at HKU. Cody has a particular passion in teaching field geology, and has accumulated over 5 years of experience teaching introductory to advanced field geology courses at UT and HKU. At HKU, Cody has helped teaching courses which provide students with invaluable field experiences, including a local week-long field camp in Lai Chi Chong each fall, and a month-long international field camp in Montana, USA each summer. These courses are designed for students to not only make field-based observations, but more importantly to instill a question driven approach to problem-solving – an imperative skill for any Earth scientist. Cody is incredibly grateful for his opportunity to pass on his experiences and assist in the teaching of these courses, and is especially appreciative of the world-class educators he has worked with and learned from over the years including Dr Jess KING, Dr Petra BACH, Dr Ryan MCKENZIE, Dr Alex WEBB, and Dr Mark HELPER.
Cody’s research utilises an array of novel geologic tools to track the timing and magnitude of tectonic processes and to understand the impacts such processes have on Earth’s dynamic system. Cody’s work has tracked the erosional evolution of 2.5 billion-year-old cratons in central India, contested tectonic models for India–Asia collision responsible for the Himalayan mountains, and linked the weathering and erosion of distinct Himalayan bedrock to observed shifts in seawater chemistry over the past 20 million years.