If you judged by the number of graduate students wandering the halls and working in the fields, you'd never guess DRI doesn't grant degrees. But every year, the institute employs about 55 graduate students on funded research projects that lead to master's and doctoral degrees from Nevada's two universities. DRI's faculty also teach about 35 courses a year at Nevada's universities and community colleges. Here are the stories of four students who work and learn at the Desert Research Institute.

Laureen Perry, a graduate research assistant with DRI's Quaternary Sciences Center, is a wife, a mother, a student, and an archaeologist. She grew up in Las Vegas, moved to northern California where she married, had four daughters, and earned her bachelor's degree in biology. Seven years ago, she returned to Las Vegas with her family and "an itch" to pursue a master's degree. Perry got hooked on archaeology after volunteering to do some field work, and is now working on her master's degree in anthropology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her adviser is UNLV's Dr. Margaret Lyneis and her research focuses on the pottery of the Virgin Anasazi who occupied southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and northwestern Arizona. This summer, working for the joint DRI/UNLV archaeological field school, she helped excavate an ancient Anasazi site in St. George, Utah. Perry received a 1996 Nevada Medal Fellowship to fund her research.

Gayle Dana

Summer in Antarctica? It's not exactly swimsuit weather, but the austral summer is warm enough to create glacial meltwater flows in the Antarctic's McMurdo Dry Valleys. A graduate research assistant in DRI's Biological Sciences Center, Gayle Dana has spent her last three austral summers in Antarctica, gathering information to assess multi-year trends in solar radiation which may influence the dry valley ecosystems. A recipient of both a NASA Global Change Fellowship and a Nevada Medal Research Fellowship, Dana not only collects her data from satellites, but also from "tromping around on the glaciers." A Ph.D. student at UNR, her adviser is Dr. Robert Wharton, DRI's vice president for research and the principal investigator for the National Science Foundation-funded McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research project.

Timothy Buchanan
After 13 years of experience in mining engineering and project management, Timothy Buchanan decided to go back to school. He explains, "After managing a mine reclamation project, which allowed me to gain experience dealing with regulators and the environmental community, I decided I wanted to learn more about all of the issues I was dealing with."He chose UNLV because of its flexibility and because of DRI's involvement in its graduate program. "The prospect of being taught by some of the world's leading experts on arid lands hydrology was very exciting," Buchanan says. Dr. Richard French, a DRI Water Resources Center hydrologist, is his adviser. Buchanan is pursuing his master's degree by working on the Southern Nevada Water Authority's "Water Harvest" project, studying the feasibility of using the storm water detention basins in the Las Vegas Valley for groundwater.

Vlad Isakov says it was an honor for him to be accepted to the DRI-based Ph.D. program in atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, because "DRI is a well-known institution and has a very good reputation in the scientific world." He should know. The Russian native earned his master's degree in physics from St. Petersburg University and his master's in meteorology from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Now a graduate research assistant in DRI's Energy and Environmental Engineering Center, Isakov is helping develop a new technique important to assessing short- and long-term weather and climate predictions. His adviser is Dr. Darko Koracin, an atmospheric physicist with DRI.