Williams Geosciences Professor Awarded NSF Grant to Study Boulder Beach Response to Storms

11:11AM / Thursday, July 02, 2020Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Rónadh Cox, the Edward Brust professor of geology and mineralogy at Williams College, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The three-year, $340,000 grant will support her research on how boulder beaches respond to storms and how they change over time.

Boulder beaches record wave action on stormy coastlines, but surprisingly little is known about them. Cox's NSF-funded project, titled "Boulder Beaches: The Understudied Archive on High-Energy Coasts," aims to increase understanding of their dynamic evolution. The study focuses on 22 sites in Ireland, which has a wide range of boulder-beach settings, so that the results will be applicable to other locations world-wide.

Using a combination of state-of-the-art aerial photogrammetry and hands-on field measurements, she will determine how factors such as wave energy, coastal geometry, topography, geology and boulder sizes control beach morphologies. As the first multi-parametric study of boulder beaches and how it responds to storms, Cox's project, which will engage students in every phase of the work, will be the most comprehensive examination yet undertaken of this dynamic and long-ignored environment.

"The moment is ripe, because as sea level rises and high-energy wave attack on coastal infrastructure becomes more frequent, there is a growing need for studies of high-energy coasts, both to understand coastal response to storms and coastal hazards, and also as a resource for engineers as they work to improve coastal protection approaches," Cox said. "As the main depositional record of wave action on rocky coasts, boulder beaches should be playing a central part in this conversation, but the lack of data and understanding have prevented their integration into coastal geomorphologic thinking. I’m particularly excited to involve Williams students in this work, and I have an excellent rising senior, Aria Mason, who has already begun research on the project."

Cox's research interests include sedimentology, sedimentary petrology, geochronology and planetary geomorphology. At Williams since 1996, she has taught courses on oceanography, geochemistry, planetary geology, and earth resources, among other subjects. Her work has been widely published and cited. She received her B.Sc. from University College Dublin, Ireland, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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