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Student Honors

by UCMP

Commencement 2018 GSI Awards Hiep Nguyen selfie

Commencement 2018: Cindy Looy, Charles Marshall, Ashley Poust, Camila Souto, Jun Ying Lim, Jeff Benca, Dori Contreras and Ivo Duijnstee. Photos by Helina Chin. Bottom left: Third from left Daniel de Latorre, Peter Kloess and Renske Kirchholtes acceptance of Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, photo courtesy of Peter Kloess. Bottom right: Hiep Nguyen selfie!

Congratulations to the UCMP graduate students who finished this spring: Jeff Benca, Dori Contreras, Dori Contreras, Ashley Poust, Rosemary Romero and Camila Souto. We wish you well in your adventures as post-docs, working with big tech companies and beyond!

Daniel de Latorre, Peter Kloess, and Renske Kirchholtes were honored with Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Awards during the spring semester.

SICB Participants

Sara ElShafie and 2018 SICB Science Through Narrative Symposium participants at the Walt Disney Museum, photo credit Helina Chin.

Sara ElShafie organized the "Science Through Narrative: Engaging Broad Audiences" Symposium at the January 2018 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Meeting. The symposium featured presenters from broad scientific fields and multiple disciplines in arts and entertainment. In March 2018, Sara ran a new public workshop, "Visual Storytelling for Science Communication," with two collaborators from Pixar - Production Designer Steve Pilcher and Art Director Matt Nolte. The workshop drew an audience of over 250 and was sponsored by the CLEAR (Communication, Literacy and Education in Agricultural Research) and SLAM (Science Leadership and Management) programs at UC Berkeley.

Larry Taylor with Los Medanos Students GSA Poster

Larry Taylor at Los Medaños College, photo courtesy Larry Taylor. Madeleine Zuercher and Tesla Monson at the winning poster, photo courtesy Tesla Monson.

Tesla Monson accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her project will use microCT-scanning to quantify the internal morphology of postcanine dentition with the aim of reconstructing human population movement in the Quaternary. During the spring semester Madeleine Zuercher, a student Tesla mentored in the Hlusko Lab, won Best Poster in Ecology and Evolution at the 2018 West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduates Research Conference for her work on dental variation in megabats.

Looy Lab students Nick Spano and Ben Muddiman were each awarded a 2018 GSA Graduate Student Research Grant in support of their respective dissertation projects.

Congratulations to UCMP graduate student Larry Taylor who received a $2,500 grant from the Paleontological Society to make paleontology more accessible to community college students! During the 2018-19 academic year, Larry and UCMP graduate students will utilize a wide array of fossils to tailor workshops for specific community colleges and address the instructional needs of classes as expressed by the community college faculty. Larry piloted the program at Los Medaños College and City College of San Francisco last year.

Postdoctoral scholar Adiël Klompmaker worked with undergraduate students in the Finnegan Lab to collect and analyze Cenozoic decapod crustacean size variations and document evidence of predation in mollusks from both sides of the Isthmus of Panama.

Congratulations also to undergraduate Hiep Nguyen (BA in Integrative Biology class of 2018) for receiving the Marian Diamond Award. This award recognizes students for their high academic achievement and leadership in research, teaching and community service. Hiep was selected, in part, for his outstanding contributions as a UCMP undergraduate research apprentice on the NSF-funded Berkeley Fossil Insect PEN project.