Lorena Moscardelli could not help but smile as she walked through aisles of high shelves at UT’s Core Research Center, each holding hundreds of boxes filled with earth core specimens.

“This is what I call the Indiana Jones archives,” said Moscardelli, principal investigator for the State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery Program.

The Jackson School of Geosciences named Moscardelli the new director of the school’s Bureau of Economic Geology on March 3. Moscardelli will be the ninth director and first woman to lead the bureau, which oversees 250 researchers and staff and receives over $30 million per year in funding, according to a news release from the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The bureau works at the intersection of geoscience research and industry. The bureau is an entirely “soft money” organization, so it relies on industrial partners to fund much of the research it completes, Moscardelli said. This reliance on industry helps focus the bureau on solution-oriented research, she said.

“In universities and research institutions, oftentimes we are so passionate about what we do that we go running in one direction, and we really don’t take the time to pause and actually see what’s happening out there,” Moscardelli said. “It’s always important to pause and to listen. What are the problems that you have that I could help you with?”

This solution-driven perspective set Moscardelli apart among the almost 100 candidates in the selection process, said Claudia Mora, dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

“Even the basic research (the bureau does), it’s really driven to solve a problem that people are currently facing,” Mora said. “(Moscardelli is) just very dedicated to that, and that’s an unusual thing for a lot of researchers.”

Graduate student Jacob Kruel said Moscardelli hosts bi-weekly meetings with the student researchers at the State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery Program to expose them to the other sectors of research at the bureau.

“That’s really important to her,” Kruel said. “That we are not being siloed in our fields.”

Moscardelli said highlighting this breadth of research at the bureau is one of her top priorities.

“A lot of my new role, as I see it, is also to help the bureau magnify and showcase the absolute, wonderful work that all these people here are doing on a daily basis,” Moscardelli said.