Dori Contreras received the 2016- 2017 Claire Englander Award from the UCMP for "mentoring undergraduate students in the collections, and in undertaking a major role in representing UCMP collections and the work we do with the iDigBio community." She also presented at two conferences in summer 2017. First, at Botany 2017 (Botanical Society of America) Dori co-ran a symposium on Campanian- Maastrichtian floras on Laramidia, presented a talk, and co-authored a second paper. Second, she gave an invited talk about workflows at the Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference, sponsored by iDigBio, the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, the University of Michigan Herbarium, and the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology in Ann Arbor, MI. We are also happy to report, Dori and her husband welcomed a baby boy, Andreas Marcel Contreras, on October 24, 2017!
Sara ElShafie continues to lead Science Through Story workshops developed out of a pilot seminar at UCMP with Pixar Animator Austin Madison in March 2016. On June 6, 2017, Sara was featured in an article on the UC Berkeley home page. She will be the primary organizer of a symposium, Science Through Narrative: Engaging Broad Audiences at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting in San Francisco on Friday, January 5, 2018. A series of manuscripts will be published based on the invited talks in the society's peer-reviewed journal in Spring/ Summer 2018.
Undergraduate student assistant Julia Anderson volunteered with the Natural History Museum of Utah in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument during summer 2017. Julia worked on the tyrannosaur, Teratophoneus, which has gained publicity recently due to its remarkable completeness. Later in July, she was field assistant to Isabel Fendley, a doctoral candidate in Earth and Planetary Sciences, in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. They took samples for geochemical analyses across many coal deposits as well as the K/Pg boundary itself.
Barnosky Lab graduate students Eric Holt and Nick Spano joined Julie Mechean (Des Moines Univ) along with Barnosky Lab Alums Susumu Tomiya and Jenny McGuire at the Natural Trap Caves in Wyoming; a deep cave with an 85-foot drop monitored by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The exploration of this unique site yielded fossils of Pleistocene megafauna with viable genetic material that could provide valuable insight into continental migration patterns, population genetics and climate-driven community changes. Check out the UCMP blog post at http://ucmp.berkeley.edu/blog/archives/4413 to learn more about their adventure.
Undergraduate student assistant Zev Brooks spent the summer at the Smithsonian NMNH with Scott Wing (plus some fieldwork in the Bighorn Basin) and he also presented a poster at GSA.
Lillian Pearson and Lauren Fowler exhibited at the Bay Area Science Festival North Bay Discovery Day in Santa Rosa on October 28th. It was a celebration of science for more than 2,000 people affected by the recent fi res and UCMP was happy to support the community through science.