Ben Clausen, Phd Is a Senior Research Scientist at the General Conference Geoscience
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Ben Clausen, PhD is a senior research scientist at the General Conference Geoscience Research Institute, as well as an adjunct p professor in geology at Loma Linda University. [ http://bclausen.net/clausen/ ]. He received an MS in geology from Loma Linda University and a PhD in physics from the University of Colorado. His nuclear physics research at half a dozen particle accelerators in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, and Russia and during two years at the University of Virginia resulted in more than twenty published papers. Since 1990 he has studied science and religion issues at the Geoscience Research Institute and has lectured and taught classes on the topic in dozens of countries around the world. From 1991 to 2003 he organized science and religion meetings for the church; in 2005 he co-authored a book on origins; in 2006 and 2009 he led geology field conferences in Colorado for church administrators and teachers; and in 2011 organized a conference on teaching origins in the Banff area of Canada. Currently, he is doing geochemistry research on the granitic rocks in California and Peru and has presented the results at meetings on the six continents and published them in several geology journals. His recent research on the American Cordillera from British Columbia to Chile is using radiometric age dating to better understand magmatic processes and plate tectonics. In May 2018 he started a science/religion research and education initiative in Zambia in association with Rusangu University. In June-July 2018 he led a month-long research and education geology field trip in Peru from the Pacific Ocean to the Altiplano to the Amazon. This was in conjunction with the Adventist universities in Peru. In September, he started a research initiative looking at the recent volcanism in Hawaii. In October, he started a research project with a former student in Mexico who now teaches at Montemorelos University. He would like to start a geology research project in Tanzania related to his geology work in southern Africa. Most of this research is very generously funded by the General Conference Faith and Science Council. During college, Clausen spent a year as a volunteer high school teacher at Solusi College in Zimbabwe and because of that married a young lady who had spent a year as a student nurse at Yuka Hospital in Zambia. Debbie is a nurse practitioner and managed diabetes education for the Loma Linda University Medical Center for 15 years. They have one daughter, Karen, who wrote a dissertation on John Milton, political theology, and the Sabbath at Notre Dame University and is now teaching English literature at Walla Walla University in Washington state. She is married to Eric Brown, an astrophysicist who did research at the Max Planck Institute in Germany for two years and now works at Microsoft. Ben just finished his twelfth marathon earlier this month. Dr. Clausen is anxious to find ways of making Adventism, Christianity, and Jesus meaningful to the next generation inside the church and to the many scientists that he interacts with regularly. .