Last year was a very productive one for the lab – with four papers in print and two in press by late December. We had seventeen accepted abstracts, posters, and talks at national and international meetings, which meant that we were traveling the world for most of the year – from Boulder to Woods Hole to Portland to Charlotte to Vienna to Tokyo to Dublin. These abstracts included talks by collaborators: David Tcheng, Washington Mio, and Carlos Jaramillo; as well as talks by the core lab: Luke, Derek (his first!), and Surangi. The lab organized two sessions: Advancing High-Resolution, High-Throughput Research in Paleoecology at IOPC/IPC in Tokyo and The Future of Quantitative Paleontology: Biometry, Computer Vision & Machine Learning at GSA in Charlotte. Many of the other talks were invited – so we are glad to see that there’s growing interest in what we do!
Surangi was invited to participate in the Palaeo50 workshop at Oxford University; she co-chaired the “Approaches” section. She also gave two invited departmental seminars, one close to home at Illinois State University and one at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She and David were also invited speakers at a Department of Homeland Security meeting on pollen forensics – a first for the lab!
Three new PhD students started in 2012. Two were not so new – Derek completed his MS in PEEC in December 2011 and Cassie had been an undergraduate researcher in the lab since August 2009. The newest graduate student, Aleja, completed her MS with Mark Bush at FIT and spent a year working with Carlos Jaramillo at the Center for Tropical Paleoecology and Archaeology at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Two lab members moved on in 2012. Stefan completed his MS in Plant Biology in May and Luke started a tenure-track position as Lecturer at Plymouth University, UK in October.
Finally, 2012 also saw the start of our second NSF grant – this one from Macrosystems Biology, on the Automated Analysis of the Reproductive Response of Two Panamanian Forests to ENSO Climate Variation – A Machine Learning Pilot Study. With this project, we hope to expand our previous work on the automated identification of black and white spruce to a significantly larger and more complex data set.
Thanks to everyone for all their hard work and effort last year. Here’s to another great year!
