2022 CAS Distinguished Research Award (CASDRA)

Each year the pool of candidates for the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Research Award (CASDRA) consists of those faculty members who are nominated for the Alumni Association for Distinguished Research or Creative Achievement (AADRACA) and who are not selected for an AADRACA that year. For more information on this award, please visit the CAS website. 

Randy Cox, Department of Earth Sciences 

Randy Cox came to the University of Memphis in 1994 as assistant professor in a full-time appointment for the Department of Geology. He moved into the Department of Earth Sciences in 1999 and is currently a full professor.

Cox’s primary research interests involve active faulting, earthquake hazard, and tectonic and climatic landscape evolution. Other interests are paleogeography, biogeography, plate tectonics, structural geology, and organic evolution. He has conducted investigations of geologically recent faulting in the Mississippi Embayment, in the southern Oklahoma Rift, in eastern Tennessee, on the U.S. Atlantic coastal plain, in Madrid Basin in central Spain, and on the North American/Caribbean plate boundary in Honduras.

He has a keen interest in the tectonic history of eastern North America. He is also investigating the timing and environmental settings of wind-blown sediment deposition in the central U.S. as part of a broader program of landscape and climate studies.

Cox is a member and Fellow of the Geological Society of America, a member of the American Geophysical Union, and a member of the Seismological Society of America.