“Oh, gosh! Surprise. Happiness.”
In case you were wondering how a Sidney Powers Memorial Award winner reacts when told she’s won.
The pronoun here is important.
Since Wallace Pratt, who was its first recipient in 1945, Powers Memorial Award winners have all been men.
All 75 of them.
Until now.
Kitty Milliken, senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, is the first not to be.
She wants to put this moment in perspective.
“I’m obviously not the first woman who might have qualified for the Powers Medal,” she said.
Even though she’s been a distinguished lecturer, a Pratt Memorial and Berg Outstanding Research Award winner, the Powers’ is different, both for her and for AAPG.
“The community of AAPG has been an important presence in my career and all of these awards represent wonderful acknowledgements of work that I’ve enjoyed so much. In a way, it’s my field of study that is being acknowledged here and I love that. It means a lot, not just to me, but to my mentors and fellow petrographers who’ve always kept faith with the notion that it’s important to look, closely, at the rocks,” she said.
An Affinity for the Small
Milliken is known industry-wide for her work in sedimentary geology, her focus on the diagenesis of siliciclastic sediments, and her works of scholarship on the evolution of rock properties in the subsurface. Her work and love for petrography, for example, which was nurtured by Robert “Luigi” Folk and his courses at UT Austin when she was an undergraduate, focuses on detailed descriptions of rocks.
She said that study, specifically, was an entry point to a larger love and wonder.
“In petroleum geology one’s predictions have a genuine chance of being tested in a real-world way. Few other areas of geoscience, dealing as they do with partial evidence of events in deep time, offer quite that sort of feedback,” Milliken said.
Most of her work has taken place at the BEG. Milliken is proud of that connection, saying the Bureau has remained steady in its focus and commitment to the craft, the art and the science of the profession.
Scott Tinker, BEG director, past AAPG president and past Halbouty winner said there’s a story from Milliken’s youth that resonates with him. He has known Milliken herself for nearly 25 years, and her reputation even longer, and recalls a story she once told him about being on a beach.
“She was laser-focused on the sand and reaching down to pick up something . . . small. She went on to share that in early elementary school, based on the study of her rock collection, she realized that details can be assembled into explanatory stories that could lead to conclusions that contrast from those built on broad-brush surface-level views,” he said.
Tinker underscored that it was a seven-year-old who concluded this.
Milliken, in thinking back to those days in Kentucky, sees that time as both sweet and bitter.
“What I remember the most is being a child in a semi-rural place at a time when people didn’t pay so much attention to children. By the time I was four I could wander freely in a large backyard. By six, I could wander from our house on Main Street into the fields, woods and creeks behind,” she recounted. “A kid could leave on a summer morning and stay out all day, sometimes with other kids, sometimes alone, always with dogs. I picked up rocks, and the fossils are what really grabbed my attention and samples were soon piling up. It could easily have been plants, or bugs or birds, but for me it turned out to be rocks and fossils. My master’s thesis on silicified evaporites actually included specimens from my childhood rock collection.”
“Today, so many kids of my acquaintance seem to live such controlled, scripted lives. Their opportunities to connect with nature in the natural, exploratory way that best feeds their intrinsic curiosity seems diminished. I worry a bit where our next generation of natural scientists will come from,” Milliken added.
Tinker said Milliken’s attention to detail means that during her walks around campus, they are often interrupted so she can study an interesting pebble she comes across or look at some odd component in the concrete.
“She has an affinity for the small things,” said Tinker.
She has done work at Exxon Production Research and the French Institute of Petroleum and sailed on five scientific expeditions of the Ocean Drilling Program and International Ocean Discovery Program. She has contributed to the Journal of Sedimentary Research and served as president of the Society for Sedimentary Geology.
Her focus, as Tinker alluded, is intense.
She once wrote a piece entitled, “Why Do We Care About Mudrocks? And, If We Do, How Can We Proceed to Study Them?”
Why do we?
“Making up two-thirds of sedimentary materials, muds and mudrocks contain most of the sedimentary record on Earth (and the same seems to be true on Mars), including the history of life and the history of climate,” she answered.
She said that by itself that would be enough justification for studying fine-grained sediments, but that’s not the only reason.
“The overall chemical reactivity of mudrock components also means that the greater volume of chemical reactions in the sedimentary part of the crust occur in muds and mudrocks. To understand the full story of subsurface fluids and reactions in sandstones and limestones, you have to address what is happening in the huge mass of mudrocks that surrounds them,” Milliken elaborated.
Collaboration in Science and Art
There are loves in her life – her husband of 40 years, Steve Seni, a geologist in his own right – that round up this fascinating scientist.
Of her marriage and partnership with someone in her profession, she said, “It’s hard to imagine having it any other way because it takes someone with a considerable understanding to appreciate the ‘why’ behind the long hours and the persistent focus in a research career. Steve is a stratigrapher but we shared many of the same graduate courses, so we have this mutual understanding of one another’s fields. We can each explain in reasonable detail the technical significance of the other’s work.”
She said he often reads early drafts of her work and tells her if something doesn’t make sense.
There is another love in her life: her art.
“Plenty of my colleagues know about my fiber art habit because they’ve been showered with things they may or may not want to hang on their walls or use in their kitchens,” she said.
As for her work, she said the enormity, possibilities and limitations of it all still often stops her in her tracks.
“I’m not an engineer, but I’m pleased to say that I’ve worked and published with several of them. To drill fewer wells and with greater efficiency? To produce what’s needed with less expense and impact?” said Milliken.
She said it all calls for science-based prediction.
“I do think, at the end of the day, it is a science-based industry, even if it sometimes seems there’s a bit of a lag in getting the best science news distributed for effective use in engineering applications,” she said.
Looking back on her career, she has some advice – for herself.
“I wish I could have sent a message in a way-back machine to my younger self, saying not to be so shy about publishing. I did publish, of course, and loved it, but I approached it with a degree of caution and perfectionism that wasn’t necessary or helpful,” Milliken recounted.
Persistence and Payoff
With regard to being the first woman in the history of the Association to be named a Powers Memorial winner, she said, “Is there any woman my age who’s come through a career in science without encountering some amount of resistance, from family, teachers, colleagues or institutions? Those obstacles are real and persist for women and many other categories of hopeful scientists.”
She acknowledges how much help she received along the way.
“I count myself most lucky in that I’ve had wonderful teachers, mentors and colleagues who collaborated with me and gave encouragement at every step,” she said. “Multiple generations of family also stepped up to ensure that I could, and would, do as I wished.”
She said her students have been her pride and joy.
“It’s a pleasure follow them as they continue to create great things.”
She said, in conclusion, her persistence through the years with pursuits others sometimes deemed to be not worthwhile, was motivated by Henry Clifton Sorby, the father of geological microscopy.
“He was quoting the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a 19th-century Swiss linguistics professor, who wrote, ‘In those early days people laughed at me. They . . . said that it was not a proper thing to examine mountains with microscopes, and ridiculed my action in every way. Most luckily I took no notice of them.’”