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Under the support of the PRF grant, we have conducted research in two related areas: (1) a theoretical development for the mechanics of V-shaped conjugate faults and (2) construction of an analog model for simulating the V-shaped conjugate faults. The theoretical development has been materialized into a long manuscript submitted to the Geological Society of America Bulletin that acknowledges the support from the PRF grant. Construction of the experimental apparatus turns out to be much more difficult and takes longer time. We designed and built the experimental device at UCLA's Engineering Workshop. The initial estimate for the construction was $14,000 with project starting a year ago in the Fall of 2008. As the construction progressed, the cost of materials and labor skyrocketing and current spending exceeded dramatically the original estimate by more three fold. That is, the current cost of model construction is $47,000. We are in the final stage of negotiating with the manager of the Workshop and hopefully the cost can be minimized within reasonable range. Due to slight complications in logistic arrangement, we did not conduct fieldwork in Tibet in the past summer. However, we have ironed out the problems and current have the work permit, field support, and personnel in place. We will conduct field mapping and sample collection for paleomagnetic analysis in the summer of 2010. Another positive news is that as a result of this PRF grant, we also successfully obtained a matching fund of $147,000 from the US National Science Foundation to work on the same problem. The additional funding will further strengthen the project and ensure excellent final products coming out of our research on this exciting frontier problem in structural geology.