We welcome Linda McCollum as the new president of the Cheney-Spokane Chapter. Linda is a professor emeritus with the Department of Geology at Eastern Washington University.
Education & Employment: Linda completed her BS and MS at University of California at Davis in the early 1970’s, and then worked for a year as an assistant geophysicist for the California Geological Survey in Sacramento. In 1980, she received her PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and spent the 1979-1980 academic year teaching at Sul Ross State University in west Texas. For the next three years, she headed up the Cordilleran Geological Survey in Reno, Nevada, which was an affiliate of Gulf Oil and Exploration Company, Houston, Texas.
She joined the geology faculty at EWU in September 1983, taking the position of petroleum geologist. She taught upper division and graduate courses, including petroleum geology, micropaleontology, paleoecology, clay mineralogy, and spring field camp, in addition to supervising Masters theses. In 1987, Ernie Gilmour went into the university administration for several years, so she took over his courses in invertebrate paleontology and historical geology, and later, when John Buchanan became heavily involved in the graduate program, she took over the stratigraphy course for several years. When Bill Steele retired, she took over his environmental geology course. Thus, she ended up almost exclusively with required undergraduate courses by the time she became departmental chair in September 1993, serving two 4 year terms.
After the graduate program was terminated due to university budget cuts, Linda developed an integrative studies course on the history of mining in the Pacific Northwest, and an international studies course on world resources and population. She also taught the Earth Science education methods course. During a couple of summers in the mid-1990’s, she teamed up with then-Provost Jim Hoffman to teach a field course on dinosaurs, in which they participated in digs on the Colorado Plateau and along the Rocky Mountain front in Montana. This course was aimed primarily at the K-12 teachers. She had to cut back a little on course offerings during her years as departmental chair from 1993-2001. She taught 23 different courses during her 25-year tenure, which reflects the ever-changing nature of the geology profession, coupled with the program demands and faculty availability.
Research: Her research interests were initially in early Paleozoic ecology and faunas, stratigraphy, and tectonics. She published peer-reviewed papers on Devonian biostratigraphy and paleoecology in New York State; Cambrian lithostratigraphy, describing ten new geologic formations in Utah and Nevada; and has described early Middle Cambrian trilobite faunas from Nevada, California, and South China. She has authored or coauthored over a dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers and presented over three dozen abstracts and talks or poster sessions. In the last decade, her focus has been on the Ice Age floods, particularly within the confines of glacial Lake Columbia.
During the last few years, she and her husband Mike have completed geologic mapping of ten 7.5-minute quadrangles, which cover about 500 square miles, westward from Cheney to Edwall and northward to Wellpinit on the Spokane Tribal Reservation. She has located water wells in these quads and matched them up with existing DOE water well reports, in order to characterize the groundwater aquifer system underlying the West Plains. As a member of the Water Resources Inventory Area (WRIA) 54, administered by Spokane County Water Resources Division, she published a report on the West Plains aquifer system.
Grants: Linda’s research was funded by EWU and National Science Foundation grants and contract through WRIA 54 totaling over half a million dollars. In recognition of her academic expertise, she was elected to represent the United States by the International Subcommission on Cambrian Stratigraphy.
Retirement & beyond: Linda became a founding member of the Cheney Spokane Chapter in 2004 and joined the board of directors in 2017. She was elected President in December, 2023.
Other interests: She had taught at the equestrian center at UC Davis during her student years, and for recreation, she still enjoys horseback riding. She also does quite a bit of hiking. Lately she has gotten the most enjoyment out of gardening and playing around with her cats.
Updated December 15, 2023