March 12, 1997 Contact: Robert Irion (408) 459-2495; irion@ua.ucsc.edu

UC SANTA CRUZ ALUMNUS WINS TOP SCIENCE PRIZE IN COSTA RICA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Seismologist Marino Protti, who received his Ph.D. from the UC Santa Cruz Earth Sciences Department in 1994, has won the National Prize in Science from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Costa Rica.

Protti, a professor at the Observatorio Vulcanologico y Sismologico de Costa Rica (OVSICORI), shared the prize with a mathematician from the Costa Rican national university. He is the first earth scientist to receive the prize, which the government awards every other year.

Protti was recognized for his work at OVSICORI and for a paper analyzing the subduction of the Cocos oceanic crustal plate beneath Costa Rica and southern Nicaragua, which causes major earthquakes. That paper, coauthored with OVSICORI's Federico Güendel (who earned his Ph.D. from UCSC in 1986) and UCSC professor of earth sciences Karen McNally, appeared in Geologic and Tectonic Development of the Caribbean Plate Boundary in Southern Central America, a special volume published in 1995 by the Geological Society of America.

This release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html).

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