Win McLaughlin was awarded a Fulbright Scholar position for 2015 to help further her research in Kyrgyzstan! She left in January 2015 to begin her 10 month stint preparing fossils in the capital of Bishkek and doing fieldwork (once the weather gets better) in the central part of the country. She is writing a blog about her experience which you can visit here.
December 2014
Nick Famoso and Meaghan Emery both were awarded the Doris O. and Samuel P. Welles Research Fund of the University of California Museum of Paleontology to advance their research!
September 2014
Dr. Hopkins, Win McLaughlin, Meaghan Emery, and Nick Famoso returned from field work in Kyrgyzstan!
February 2014
Nick Famoso, Dr. Hopkins, and Dr. Davis returned from the 10th NAPC which was held at the University of Florida. Despite snow storms, they all arrived in Florida and managed to have a great meeting.
Nick Famoso and Meaghan Emery both successfully passed their comprehensive exams!
May 2013
Another busy month in the Hopkins lab. Congratulations to our three graduating undergraduates: Amy Atwater, Brianna McHorse, and Kelsey Stilson have all successfully defended their honors theses, and everyone passed with distinction. Brianna McHorse was chosen as one of the Oregon Six at the UO, a group of the highest-achieving Phi Beta Kappa inductees for the year.
Meaghan Emery won the People’s Choice Award for her presentation in the UO Three-Minute Thesis competition, for which she received $200 and endless bragging rights; she also won first prize for her poster in the UO graduate research forum. At the UO Undergraduate Research Symposium, Savannah Olroyd presented a poster on variation in fossil beaver teeth and Brianna McHorse gave a talk on identifying isolated postcrania in the fossil record.
David Levering, lab graduate, will be leading a field crew this summer at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument.
April 2013
April has been a big month for lab successes. Sam Hopkins went to a National Evolutionary Synthesis Center catalysis workshop, where research connections abound.
Win McLaughlin and Meaghan Emery, both PhD students, received Theodore Roosevelt travel grants from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. They plan to use this support to travel to the American Museum of Natural History for data collection this summer. John Jacisin III, a MS student, received a Geological Society of America grant for summer field research on John Day herps.
Savannah Olroyd won a prize for her fabulous poster about research on leafcutter ant behavior at the International Projects Fair.
Graduating senior Amy Atwater will be taking on a job as a Paleontologist/GIS Technician at Denali National Park in Alaska, where she’ll be doing plenty of fieldwork and hopefully not fighting off too many grizzly bears. Former Hopkins Lab PhD student John Orcutt has just accepted a postdoc at Cornell College (in Iowa), where he will be teaching undergraduate biology and getting some research done on Pleistocene biogeography.
March 2013
Brianna McHorse, a graduating senior in the lab, has received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation for her proposal, “Testing function in modern and fossil horses using three-dimensional musculoskeletal modeling.” Congratulations also to our graduate student Nick Famoso for receiving an Honorable Mention for his project, “Ecological response to catastrophic pyroclastic volcanic events in the fossil record of North America,” which will examine how diet, morphology, ecology, and aridity are affected by super-volcanic eruptions.
Win McLaughlin and Meaghan Emery have just returned from a collections research trip to the UCMP at Berkeley, where they photographed and measured many an oreodont and deer.
Samantha Hopkins was just named president of the Oregon Academy of Sciences at the annual meeting of the OAS in Salem, at Willamette University. It was announced that the University of Oregon will host next year’s meeting of the OAS, offering an opportunity to showcase our research to the Oregon research community.
February 2013
Samantha Hopkins just received word that her proposal to the NSF, addressing macroevolutionary patterns of diet and diversification in mammals, has been funded. This grant will accelerate our research into the role ecology plays in driving patterns of mammalian diversification.
Win McLaughlin has officially advanced to PhD candidacy by passing her comprehensive exams.
January 2013
Edward Davis has returned from the International Biogeography Society conference, where he co-organized a symposium titled “The convergence of conservation paleontology and biogeography.” The symposium showcased the innovative research of several paleobiologists, highlighting the need for a deep-time perspective to answer questions of organisms’ response to changing environmental pressures.