About UCMP : News and events : UCMP newsletter

Tidbits

Congratulations!
To Sarah Amugongo for being awarded an L.S.B. Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellowship and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Wadsworth International Fellowship to support her research in human evolution and bone biology.

To Tony Barnosky, who received a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship to work in Santiago, Chile, Aug.–Sept. 2007, the beginning of a full-year sabbatical in that country.

To Lorraine Casazza on receipt of the 2007 Joseph A. Cushman Award for Student Research. This award supports "worthy Master's and Doctoral Student research projects dealing with the systematics, biostratigraphy, paleoecology, and ecology of fossil or living foraminifera."

To Bill Clemens, who received the Fellows' Medal from the California Academy of Sciences. This is the highest honor awarded by the Fellows.

To Scott Fay on his appointment to run the Molecular Phylogenetics Lab, a joint research facility of the UCMP and the University/Jepson Herbaria. In this position, Scott uses his extensive training and experience in molecular biology to train new students in the sequencing of their own organisms, from dinoflagellates to vertebrates.

To Drs. Andrew Lee (now a postdoc at Ohio University) and Jackie Moustakas (postdoc with the Hlusko Lab) who filed their dissertations in December.

To Karen Osborne, who is now Dr. Osborne and has begun her postdoctoral position at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

To Kevin Padian, who was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

To Sheila Patek, who has received the 2008 Bartholomew Award from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology given for "distinguished contributions to comparative physiology and biochemistry or to related fields of functional and integrative biology."

To Oliver Rizk for being awarded an NSF graduate fellowship to support his research in developmental biology and primate evolution.

To Michele Weber on the completion of an extensive, ~nine-month collecting trip across the Pacific and Indian Oceans from Baja California to the Red Sea to sample tissues from the giant clam Tridacna in her study of the phylogeography of the symbionts.

To Sarah Werning on passing her orals.

UCMP thank yous
To Jim Ingle for his donation of Stanford's micropaleo collection to UCMP. This collection consists of ~12,000 slides, mostly of foraminifera. It is of particular importance because it includes the type collection from R.M. Kleinpell's dissertation and 1938 landmark book, Miocene Stratigraphy of California.

To Bruce Lander, Paleo Environmental Associates, Inc., for his ongoing support of the micropaleontology and vertebrate collections. His most recent donation to UCMP was made in memory of Joe Gregory.

Other news
The UCMP has donated $1,000 in support of the second Integrating Evolution, Development, and Genomics meeting (IEDG 2008). This meeting will take place on campus and will focus on themes of integration, diversity, and education in the fields of evolution, development, and genomics. The IEDG 2008 organizers are graduate students from various backgrounds in the departments of Integrative Biology and Molecular and Cell Biology.

Carole Hickman gave the American Microscopical Society Past Presidential Lecture at SICB in San Antonio on January 3. Her topic was "The snail: evolving metaphors and visual representations."

Considered "cool news," Brian Swartz was given access to dissect the coelacanth and Australian lungfish in the collections of the California Academy of Sciences.