At the beginning of the semester we celebrated the publication of former undergraduate lab member Anna Zavodszky's Senior Honors Thesis on chevron bones in the Journal of Mammalogy, and current IDPAS student Sarah Mincer's publication on the macroevolution of tail length diversity in mammals in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Congratulations Anna and Sarah! 🥳
(clicking the images below will link you to the article on the journal website)
In February, three FML graduate students (Abi, Sarah, and Daphne), three FML undergraduate students (Maya, Lydia, and Gill), and I visited Cherry Avenue Elementary School in Sayville NY to deliver our newest outreach activity "What Fossils Can Tell Us!". In this activity we worked with elementary school students at three different stations: 1) how anatomy reveals evolutionary relationships among mammals, 2) what clues teeth provide about what an animal ate, and 3) the ways limb bones tell us about how an animal moves around its environment. More photos and information about this event can be viewed here: https://www.sayvilleschools.org/Page/18631
Though our lab closed in mid-March due to COVID-19, students remained productive through the rest of the semester. Graduating senior Lydia Myers completed her Senior Honors Thesis on "A lorisoid-like distal humerus from the Middle Miocene of Napudet (Kenya)." Lydia received a prestigious Giuliano Global Research Fellowship for travel to Nairobi to complete her project and was featured on the SBU College of Arts and Sciences webpage for her thesis :
She was also awarded an ANT/EBH Outstanding Student Award in recognition of exemplary leadership, service, and performance in the classroom. Congratulations Lydia! 🥳 We are so proud of Lydia and all of her accomplishments at Stony Brook University! We wish her the best as she departs this fall to continue her studies in the biological anthropology doctoral program at The University of Texas at Austin.
We also extend congratulations to another lab member for their outstanding work this past Spring. Maya Bharatiya was Stony Brook's Campus Representative for the Goldwater Scholarship for work she is completing with IDPAS student's Abigail Nishimura and Deming Yang. Maya will be completing her Senior Honors Thesis this coming academic year. Congratulations Maya! 🥳
Finally, we welcome incoming student Zacchariah Apolito the FML! Zacchariah spent the spring semester at the Human Origins Field School in the Turkana Basin (Kenya) and will begin his Masters in the FML in Fall 2020.
Welcome Zacchariah! 🥳
