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Students

Students are an important part of any active research lab, and I've been lucky enough to work with many graduate, undergraduate, and high school students. You can read a little bit about them and their projects below.

Current Students

	David Parker High School (Summer 2009)	David attends Hawken School and worked with me last summer in conjunction with his school's STEMM science program. His project involved sorting, identifying, and cataloging several hundred specimens from the early Miocene (Santacrucian) fauna of Pampa Castillo, Chile. Once all this information has been integrated into our database, it will be used to investigate the relative abundances of species and higher level groups, which can then be compared to values from other localities of the same age.
	Leah Anderson M.S. Student (2004-07)	Leah joined the Evolutionary Biology track of the Department of Anatomy in the fall of 2004. The following summer she worked on a pilot study at the Field Museum examining the limbs and pectoral girdle of Protypotherium, an interatheriid notoungulate from the Santacrucian of Argentina; this later formed the basis for her thesis. We presented results of this study at the 2005 SVP annual meeting and the manuscript arising from an expanded version of this research was recently published in Paleontologia Electronica.
	Kyle Niemi Undergrad. (Spring 2009)	Kyle worked on a project examining the morphology of caviomorph rodent incisors to determine whether certain characteristics can be correlated with diet in modern species. He began by studying specimens in the zoology collections at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and then put together a data set suitable for a pilot study using specimens from the nearby Carnegie Museum of Natural History. We presented results at the 2009 SVP Annual meeting in Bristol and are working on the manuscript.
	Thomas Sheppard Undergrad. (Spring 2007)	Tom worked with me on a small project for a course he was taking, ANTH/BIOL 394, Seminar in Evolutionary Biology. His project involved using regressions of limb bone dimensions and body mass in modern caviomorph rodents to predict body masses of extinct rodents from the early Miocene Santa Cruz fauna of Argentina. These data will be very helpful for increasing the precision of an Ecological Diversity Analysis of Santa Cruz that Beth Townsend and I presented a few years ago.
	Debbie Weinstein Undergrad. (Spring 2007)	Debbie undertook a semester-long project describing mesowear (i.e., tooth cusp wear) in three notoungulates from Salla, Bolivia. We then used similar data from modern mammals to infer the diets of these species. The preliminary results of this study were presented at the 2007 SVP Annual Meeting in Austin and the manuscript was published in PPP in 2008. Although mesowear has been studied in many modern ungulates, this is the first study involving notoungulates.
	Megan Burns Undergrad. (Summer 2005)	Megan was an undergraduate at CWRU and worked with me to fulfill the requirements for a SAGES capstone experience.  Her project involved studying some of the armadillo material our team collected from the late early Miocene Chucal Fauna of northern Chile. This material is from a small armadillo, close to the size of the modern pichi, and may represent a new species of Stenotatus; the material is too fragmentary to permit certain identification.
	Susan Grana Undergrad. (Summer 2005)	Susan was an undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan University and worked with me through SPUR (Summer Program for Undergraduate Research), a program funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For her project, she studied some of the glyptodont material our team collected from the late early Miocene Chucal Fauna of northern Chile. Subsequent analyses have determined it represents a new species of primitive glyptodontid.