Christa Placzek, PhD

Hooray, she did it! After 7 long years, one marriage, two children, a new house and multiple out of country experiences and a lot of really hard, gruelling work, it is now Christa Placzek, PhD. It's hard to describe the amount of time and energy, not to mention some of the risk of foriegn travel, that goes into those three little letters. Christa has exactly three 5 drawer file cabinets full of scientific journal papers, and she has read them. Christa produced 170 new radiocarbon and Uranium/Thorium dates in her field area of South America (it takes 3-4 days to process 4 rc samples and weeks to process a U/Th sample and the calibrations that go with it). Somewhere in there she managed to develop an important tephrachronology for the Altiplano. To do this, she spent over 4 months in South America camping in one of the most remote places on Earth (the Salar de Uyuni and environs). It wasn't armchair camping either at 3,500 meters (close to 11,500'), cold, windy, radiant sun, dusty, salty, lots of potatos and onions (lots), and lots of marching up and down carrying a heavy load of rocks. I did some of that with her, and it was tough. Except for a couple of nights in La Paz, that was fun if I remember it correctly or at all.

Countless days and evenings in the lab, waiting for samples to drip through the chromotography columns. Lots of fiddling with machines, lots of waiting for David Steinke or Jon to show up and fiddle with the machines.

And then writing. And rewriting. And then rejection followed by more rewriting and waiting (130 days) for some editor to write back and say accepted with these revisions. Followed by more rewriting. And then the next journal article.

In the mean time, she managed to start raising two wonderful smart boys, and continued to raise her husband (moi) to a tolerable level of civilization and comfort. Her three boys are very grateful and we love her mucho grande!

What to do next? Well....time to go get us some of them Meat Apples they got down in the Ozarks!