USGS Mendenhall Fellow Stan Mordensky Presents His Research

Stanley Mordensky is a USGS Mendenhall Fellow who received his PhD in Engineering Geology from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and has joined a team at the USGS examining machine Learning and the next generation of geothermal energy assessments.  

“My experience as a Mendenhall Fellow has been and remains a whirlwind of learning. I am a researcher bridging the fields of geoscience and machine learning to find geothermal resources and address our energy needs of tomorrow. Every day brings new challenges and puzzles that require me to reach beyond my fields of immediate expertise to areas like the other natural sciences and computational disciplines to build multidisciplinary solutions. Having a role in which I am forced constantly to learn and discover is the single greatest part of being a Mendenhall Fellow. 

 Although the dynamics of the challenges may initially seem daunting, I have not been alone in addressing them. I work as part of a small but highly functional team composed of Erick Burns, Jake DeAngelo, John Lipor (our Portland State University affiliate), Jeff Pepin, Ryan Cahalan, and myself. We learn from one another. Perhaps a bit unanticipatedly, I consider myself a beneficiary of a world-class mentorship, and can argue that I have learned more in my years as a Mendenhall Fellow than during my graduate studies. In my opinion, this mentorship has been the greatest and yet too often unsung benefit of being a USGS Mendenhall Fellow.”