Dr. Brittany Brand to be keynote speaker at UC Clermont Commencement April 26

BATAVIA – Dr. Brittany Brand, associate professor of Geology at Boise State University in Idaho will be the keynote speaker at the UC Clermont Commencement Celebration on Friday, April 26 at the Oasis in Loveland.

Brand is a UC Clermont Alum, who began her education at UC Clermont as a Post-Secondary Enrollment Option (PSEO) student at the be her junior year at Glen Este High School. She is a third generation UC Clermont college alum, along with her mother Jill Morse and her late grandmother Sue Craig.

After graduating from Glen Este High School in 1999, she transferred to Wright State University in Dayton with the 93 credit hours she earned at UC Clermont and earned her bachelor’s degree in Geology in 2002. She went on to earn a master’s degree in Geology from Boise State University in Idaho in 2004 and then completed her Ph.D. in Geology at Arizona State University in Tempe in 2008.

Brand is a physical volcanologist-volcanic sedimentologist with a wide range of research interests involving eruption dynamics, phreatomagmatic (underwater) eruptions, and sediment transport in volcanic flows as well as volcanic hazard assessment. The foundation of her research is field-based observation and measurements. Her work takes her all over the world to observe volcanoes in exotic places.

She has been featured on the Discovery Channel special on Pompeii that will air this summer, in National Geographic - How To Build a Volcano in 2012 and the History Channel – How the Earth Was Made - Mount St. Helens in 2011.

She will be introduced by her former professor and mentor – Dr. A.M. Hunt, associate professor of Geology at UC Clermont.

The UC Clermont Commencement Celebration is exclusively for UC Clermont students and their families held the evening before the University-wide Commencement Ceremony. The college will celebrate 31 graduates of its first home-grown bachelor’s degree in Applied Administration.