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Dr. Bennett received his Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1995. He joined TAMIU in 2002 and is an Associate Professor of Geology. Since joining TAMIU, he has authored or co-authored a total of ten referred papers and has been greatly supportive in securing over 1.7 million dollars of external funding at TAMIU. Past research efforts have focused on the geochemical analysis of basaltware, meteorites, coal, and volcanic rocks.

More recently, he has collaborated with Dr. Tobin on research focused on hydrology and remote sensing and was a Co-Investigator on Dr. Tobin's NASA-funded project that investigated the utility of precipitation data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission for supporting hydrological modeling. Currently, he is a member of the NASA SMERGE science and outreach teams. SMERGE is a root zone soil moisture product for the United States that is currently under development. Root zone soil moisture is a critical climate variable and is a fundamental limiting factor on agricultural productivity.