Tidbits, September 2011

Welcome to four new students!
Winnie Hsiung joins the Looy Lab. She received her degree from Texas A & M, Department of Geology and Geophysics, and will be focusing on climate change and palynology.

Ash (Ashley) Poust joins the Padian Lab from Montana State University. He has experience already in dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and has done field work in Montana and museum work in China.

Natalia Villavicencio joins the Barnosky Lab. She attended the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and will be focusing on paleoecology.

Whitney Reiner joins the Hlusko Lab. She received her M.A. from CUNY Hunter College this past spring and her B.A. from New York University in 2006. She is focusing on primate evolution.

Congratulations!
To Cindy Looy who received a Hellman Family Faculty Fund research award in support of her research on late Paleozoic conifers.

To Brian Swartz! Not only did he finish his Ph.D. but he also has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship to stay here and work with Brent Mishler on the structure of evolutionary theory, the nature of species, speciesism, and the sociopolitical ramifications of speciesist thinking and scientific illiteracy.

Other UCMP news
Liz Boatman, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley has been working with Mark Goodwin on the preservation of dinosaur soft tissues and fossil baleen for the past two years and Mark serves on her Ph.D. committee. Liz received "Best Student Poster Prize" at the Microscopy and Microanalysis conference in Nashville, TN, in August.

New funding to UCMP outreach efforts
UCMP received a workshop grant from the National Science Foundation to bring together experts in pre-service education to examine strategies and recommendations for integrating Understanding Science resources into science methods courses.