Tidbits & Calendar, September 2014

Calendar of
upcoming events

First Wednesday of each month
East Bay Science Café — On October 1, graduate student Yu Zeng of the UCB Animal Flight Laboratory will be speaking on flight in stick insects.

Friday, October 10, 2014
Dodging extinction — A Homecoming Weekend Faculty Lecture (and book signing) by UCMP's Tony Barnosky.

Saturday, November 1, 2014
Bay Area Science Festival, Discovery Days at AT&T Park — A program full of interactive exhibits, experiments, games, and shows, all meant to entertain and inspire.

Congratulations!
This summer we celebrated the career of Dave Lindberg, past UCMP Director, Professor of Integrative Biology and now Emeritus Professor. Dave's life history and career accomplishments were center stage at a July retirement party organized by his former and current students. Dave's colleagues, friends, and family gathered to recognize his many contributions to the field of malacology and to the lives of generations of scientists. See a selection of photos from the party.

Welcome!
The UCMP welcomes five new graduate students this Fall into the labs of UCMP curators: Caitlin Boas (Finnegan), from Brooklyn College; Marianne Brasil (Hlusko), from Cal; Sara Elshafie (Padian), from the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska; Nick Spano (Barnosky), from the University of Minnesota at Duluth; and Zixiang Zhang (Barnosky), from Stanford.

Welcome to new research associate Yael Edelman-Furstenburg from the Geological Survey of Israel who will work on Miocene foraminifera starting in December 2014.

UCMP welcomes postdocs Christopher Schmitt and Michaela Huffman to the Hlusko Lab. Chris will be teaching IB35ac this semester and is collaborating on quantitative genetic analyses of non-human primate phenotypic variation. Michaela, who completed her Ph.D. at The Ohio State University, will help develop a project studying human dental development, variation, and adaptation in the Americas.

Welcome to Giovanni Rapacciuolo, a postdoc in the Marshall Lab, who earned his Ph.D. at Imperial College, London. Giovanni will work on museum informatics in service of global change biology.

Welcome postdoctoral scholar, Jessica Bean, to the Understanding Global Change project. Jessica received her Ph.D. at UC Davis in geology (emphasis in evolutionary biology) with Geerat Vermeij, and was program manager for the NSF GK-12 Program at Bodega Marine Laboratory. Also currently an Anthropology Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Davis, Jessica studies gastropod growth patterns and isotopic signatures to determine the geographic sources of shell beads from the archaeological record of California. Jessica is no stranger to the UCMP, and previously worked with the CAL:BLAST program. Working with the Understanding Science team, she also developed the Scientific Process Mapping Program, an interactive journaling tool utilizing the Understanding Science Flowchart.

Understanding Global Change project update
The Understanding Global Change project continues to make excellent progress on an expected spring 2015 launch of the UCMP Understanding Global Change web resource. The writing team was busy this summer creating content for the site that highlights the drivers and impacts of change from both deep and modern times. The project held a very successful one-week Understanding Global Change summer institute in August for 25 teachers (mostly middle and high school) who previewed the website, examined process and examples of change storylines, and explored relevant teaching resources aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core Math and Language Arts Standards. Similar to the Think Evolution summer institute now in its 6th year, we plan to offer the Understanding Global Change summer institute as an annual event.

Postdoc Jessica Bean discusses ocean circulation with teachers at the Understanding Global Change summer institute in August. Photo courtesy of Lisa White.