IN MEMORIAM

Deborah W. Kuehn
1954-2002
Debbie came from Syracuse, New York, and graduated from Juniata College in central Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Geology in 1976. She had met Ken Kuehn while at Juniata; they were married in 1977, attended graduate school together at Penn State, and had a daugher, Kerry Ann Kuehn, in 1980.

Her 1980 MS thesis in Geology addressed Offshore transgressive peat deposits of southwest Florida: evidence for a late holocene rise of sea level. Her 1983 PhD thesis was entitled Characterization of the organic structure of the Lower Kittanning coal seam using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and optical properties.
Being at Penn State at that time meant that she was a graduate school colleague of many future TSOP officers. Debbie held positions with the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and the Western Kentucky University departments of Chemistry and Geogaphy/Geology. While at WKU she spent four years as Editor of the Journal of Coal Quality which was published there.

She joined the full-time faculty there in 1991 and retired as Associate Professor in the Geography/Geology Department in 1998 for health reasons. That Department's memorial page (see below) notes: "She taught introductory geology, historical geology, sedimentology, and paleontology in the WKU geology program. During her academic career, Debbie was author or co-author on 33 technical publications in a variety of geoscience subdisciplines and acquired nearly $100,000 in funding to support research for herself and her students. Debbie worked closely with students and was appreciated by them for her easy communication of often-complex material and her genial personality."


 

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