Tidbits

Congratulations!
To Diane Erwin, who was voted in as the new Editor of the "Bibliography of American Paleobotany" by the Paleobotanical Section of the Botanical Society of America.

To Charles Marshall who will be one of 16 invited speakers at the upcoming symposium, "Pathways to a Sustainable Energy Future," featuring energy and climate scientists from both UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, plus leading international experts.

To Tiago Quental and Charles Marshall whose paper, Diversity dynamics: Molecular phylogenies need the fossil record, was designated as the featured article in the June 21, 2010, issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

To Sterling Nesbitt on his marriage to Michelle Stocker, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Welcome new students!
Lucy Chang joins the Marshall Lab from the University of Chicago. She is interested in paleoecology, particularly the interplay of ecology and the physical environment on evolutionary and spatial scales, with a probable focus within marine invertebrates.

Mike Holmes joins the Hlusko Lab. Mike did his undergraduate work at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where he studied post-translational modification of cell cycle proteins in purple sea urchin embryos. He then did a Master's degree at the University of Oregon investigating the effects of sediment on deep-sea corals from the Gulf of Mexico.

Dave Hurt joins the Lindberg Lab. He attended North Carolina State University, where he received his B.S. in Zoology and Biochemistry with a minor in Genetics. At Berkeley, he will be studying physiological adaptation to environmental change in intertidal crustaceans, specifically in the context of anthropogenic climate change.

Renske Kirchholtes joins the Looy Lab. She attended the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands where she studied Physical Geography and was also a trainee at the Dutch Geological Survey. She will be focusing on phytolith research and its application in paleoenvironmental reconstructions.

Rosemary Romero joins the Lindberg Lab. She attended UC Santa Cruz for her B.S. and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories for her M.S. before coming to Berkeley. She is studying community ecology in marine systems and is specifically interested in seaweeds and how disturbance shapes intertidal communities.

Mary Allison Stegner joins the Barnosky Lab. Mary received her B.S. from Stanford last June and is interested in Quaternary environments of North America; in particular, how we can use spatial variation to understand temporal variation, and vice versa.

Boran Zhang also joins the Marshall Lab from Peking University, where he majored in Paleobiology. Boran has done some basic research on Cambrian-Ordovician trilobite diversity in South China and is interested in biodiversity.

Other UCMP news
Emily Lindsey has just left for three months of field work at her Proyecto Megaterio site in Ecuador.

Thanks to support from a NPS George Melendez Wright Climate Change Fellow­ship, Kaitlin Maguire is spending this semester doing field work at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon.

New funding to UCMP outreach efforts
UCMP is pleased to announce that we will be working with paleontologist David Jablonski at the University of Chicago to develop a set of educational materials on the dynamics of diversification and extinction. A student-friendly reader and an interactive data set and lab are in the works. Our involvement in this project will be supported by a NASA grant supplement in the amount of $29,881. The education and outreach team will also be working with the Euteleost Tree of Life effort out of University of Kansas and the Geochronology Center here in Berkeley to develop educational materials for their NSF-funded projects.