Congratulations to Julia Schap, who won a prestigious Stengl-Wyer Scholar position from UT Austin! This will provide her with funding to do a 3-year postdoc and additional funding for research expenses. Julia’s project is called “Of mice and men: Leveraging functional traits of small mammals across past, present, and future communities to anticipate conservation...
Congratulations to freshly minted, Dr. Julia Schap, who successfully defended her dissertation on Monday!...
A huge congratulations to Ben Shipley for winning the 2023 International Biogeography Society Doctoral Dissertation Award. Ben’s dissertation examined the drivers of global mammalian endemism. He will be presenting a plenary talk at the IBS Conference in Prague this January as a result of his success....
A huge congratulations to the latest SEPL PhD, newly-minted Dr. Danny Lauer. Danny successfully defended his dissertation in early July and officially received his PhD in August. SEPL is going to miss Danny a ton, but we are so excited for you to work in practical ways to make the world a more sustainable...
SEPL participated in two conferences this summer: the International Union for Quaternary Research Congress in Rome and the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists in Anchorage. Both conferences were a huge success, with a total of eight presentations and posters. Highlights included first-time meetups between longterm collaborators and a “family” mixer with...
A huge congratulations to Ben Shipley for being the first SEPL student to successfully defend their dissertation! Newly minted Dr. Shipley also just earned an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, and he will be joining Erin Saupe at Oxford to study range sizes through time. We’re going to miss Ben here at SEPL, but we wish...
After several years in the works, a new special issue featuring 12 foundational papers about Natural Trap Cave research has been published in Quaternary International. Julia Schap’s initial analysis of the community composition of the small mammals off NTC is included in the special issue, and PI McGuire co-authors five of these papers, including...
Leila joins us from a postdoc at Texas State University. She is a functional morphologist who will be exploring how carnivoran jaw structures are distributed with respect to environmental conditions on the landscape. She will be working with the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa project to improve our understanding of trait-environment interactions, particularly in East...
Katherine just finished her master’s degree at Oklahoma State, and she will be joining SEPL to study adaptations to aridity in mammals. She plans to study how stable isotope geochemistry and morphology has shifted in the mammal communities at Natural Trap Cave. She also is interested in the implications of the presence of a...
Check out this article about our latest grant! We will study fossils in Africa to forecast how humans and climate affect wildlife. The study will build an understanding of the continent’s animals, physical traits developed, and their relationships/responses to environmental changes: http://b.gatech.edu/3I5iGYq This grant will fund grad student Danny Lauer’s dissertation research. Also, grad...
