Pray named distinguished educator

Lloyd C. Pray, emeritus professor of geology and geophysics, has been named a 1998 recipient of the Distinguished Educator Award by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the world’s largest geoscience association. Pray will receive the award May 17 at the association’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City.

After first teaching at the California Institute of Technology and leading the Denver Research Center of the Marathon Oil Co., Pray joined the UW–Madison geology and geophysics faculty in 1968. Through his research, Pray was instrumental, among other things, in developing the axioms of porosity in carbonate rocks and in profiling the stratigraphy of the Sacramento and Guadalupe Mountains.

As a teacher, Pray was known for his ability to portray geologic concepts and discoveries with logic and enthusiasm. The association cited Pray for “a career of inspired teaching at all levels, reflecting the attributes of honor, creativity and wonder in science; and for groundbreaking research on carbonate rocks.”