Donald W. Fiesinger Petrology Teaching Lab
Room 101
Funded with a lead gift of $500,000 from the Browning Foundation, along with donations from alumni, faculty, staff and friends, this renovated facility serves as a teaching lab for Utah State University’s core major geology classes, including lab sections of rocks and minerals, sedimentology and stratigraphy, structural geology and igneous and metamorphic petrology. The lab was dedicated on April 13, 2017.
A highlight of the refurbished lab is updated instructional technology that provides capabilities for recording lectures and lab exercises, along with equipment to broadcast lab sections of courses to distance campuses. The lab, which is open to students beyond classroom hours, serves as a gathering place for mentorship and a workroom for collaborative study and research by students and faculty.
A native of Syracuse, New York, Donald Fiesinger joined Utah State University in 1976. He was a member of the geology faculty and served as department head from 1982 to 2000. He was named interim dean for the College of Science in 2000 and dean in 2003, a position he held until 2007.
Thomas E. Oldham Geology Computer Laboratory
Room 207
The installation of a seismograph at the Agricultural College of Utah (now Utah State University) was made possible through a gift from the estate of the late Thomas E. Oldham, an English-born resident of Logan who died in 1938. A two-component Wood-Anderson seismograph was purchased with $1,000 from the Oldham estate, and a twelve-inch accelerograph was installed by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey to complete the equipment of the station. Installation of the accelerograph was completed in July 1939, and the Wood-Anderson instruments began operation on January 26, 1940. The seismograph room was in the basement of the south wing of the main building on the campus of the Agricultural College of Utah. The Thomas E. Oldham Geology Computer Laboratory houses the clock used in the Oldham Seismograph Station and displays a seismogram of an earthquake on the Peru-Bolivia border that was recorded in the basement of Old Main.
*Note: All bios are current and up-to-date as of Summer 2022.