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Students

Students are an important part of any active research lab, and I have 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

	Andrew Franco Undergrad. (2010-11)	Andrew worked with me on a SAGES Capstone project that was an extension of the pilot project Kyle Niemi (below) undertook a couple years before. First, he increased the number of specimens and species in our study of rodent incisor morphology. This study was published in the Journal of Mammalogy in 2011. Andrew then worked on a pilot study applying the method to fossil rodents from the Santa Cruz Formation. We are in the process of writing this up for publication.
	Diane Moon Undergrad. (2010-11)	Diane worked with me on a SAGES Capstone project investigating mesowear in native South American ungulates. This is part of our NSF-funded project to better understand diet in these animals. She studied casts of specimens from the early Miocene (Santacrucian) locality of Santa Cruz, Argentina, and compared them to data from a variety of modern ungulates of known diet. These data will provide dietary information about these species, and will be combined with microwear data to test whether cheek tooth crown height is an accurate indicator of diet in species with hypselodont (ever-growing) cheek teeth.
	Stephanie Sang High School (Summer 2010)	Stephanie attends Solon High School and spent her summer helping me check and expand our database of Tertiary South American marsupicarnivores. This involved tracking down many publications and cross-referencing names with specimen numbers, localities, and formations. These data will be included in an analysis of South American carnivore taxonomic and morphologic diversity that we plan to submit for publication after presenting our initial results at the SVP annual meeting in Pittsburgh
	Marie Brosovich High School (Summer 2010)	Marie attends Hawken School and worked with me this summer in conjunction with her school's STEMM science program. The goal of her project was to photograph, measure, describe, and identify the litoptern remains (teeth, postcranial bones, etc.) from the early Miocene (Santacrucian) fauna of Pampa Castillo, Chile. We'd like to combine this information with that from other groups of endemic ungulates to provide a more detailed picture of the specimens collected from this fauna.
	Jen Chick M.S. Student (2007-10)	Jen was a graduate student in the Department of Biology. For her M.S. thesis (which she defended in January 2009), she studied the rodents of the middle Miocene (Laventan) Quebrada Honda Fauna of southern Bolivia. Her preliminary research indicated four species were present in the collections made by Federico Anaya and me in May 2007 (which are housed at the UATF in Potosi, Bolivia). She subsequently integrated information from collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and has a manuscript in review that revises this important rodent fauna.
	Tatiana Dolgushina Undergrad. (2009-10)	Tatiana started working with me through a CWRU Evolutionary Biology Program summer internship, and then completed her SAGES Capstone project with me (which she presented at Research ShowCase). Her project involved quantifying the taxonomic and morphologic diversity of marsupial carnivores in South America during the Oligocene and Miocene epochs. We collaborated with a colleague to analyze these data, and presented a paper on the subject at the 2010 SVP annual meeting.
	David Parker High School (Summer 2009)	David attends Hawken School and worked with me 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.
	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.
	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.
	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.