A careful look in a bucket of seawater containing bioluminescent ctenophores and a decent dose of Joseph Conrad was all it took for me to be enchanted by the strange and marvelous oceans that blanket our planet. My high school teachers indulged me and let me abruptly graduate, and leave Ohio, midway through my senior year. I was running away to sea by joining the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, MA, for a college semester of oceanography, nautical science, and maritime history and literature. After a few training weeks onshore, we flew to the Caribbean, boarded the SSV Corwith Cramer, and sailed to Nova Scotia guided by the stars and nautical charts. I so loved life onboard that my parents had to convince me to try out college for a semester rather than complete my certification immediately to be an able seaman. I agreed and attended Duke University. While there, I took advantage of their marine lab and formative research training opportunities supported by the National Science Foundation. Before long, I found myself heading out west to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for my PhD.
Today I am a paleontologist, and I became a paleontologist because I wanted to better understand what the future might bring. I wanted to understand what it is that we are doing to this planet we call Earth, and to her oceans. I wanted to understand what me might do to preserve the ecosystems that we so desperately depend on for our well-being. These are really hard questions to answer from the present day alone as many of the processes and feedbacks that cause a minor disturbance to cascade into a global mass extinction operate on spatial and temporal scales that are hard to measure, or have yet to occur. It is for this reason that my research uses past catastrophes, past intervals of global change, and past conditions. By looking to the past, I hope to advance our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of our living planet during the current biotic upheaval.
Even though this is ‘About Me’, it seems wrong to pretend that I do any of what I do by myself. Science is a wonderfully interactive endeavor, and I have never worked alone. I love being a scientist because we do what we do together. From working in teams in the field or on boats, to dynamically supporting one another in the lab and in the department, to collaborating with friends around the world, the ideas and approaches that I take –that we take—are better because of the diverse expertise and experiences of all those who come together to address a given research problem. I have had amazing mentors (formal and informal), incredible students and postdocs, and wonderful and brilliant colleagues.
Now more than ten years after defending my PhD on mass extinctions in the fossil record, I am an Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University. I am also fortunate to be an Associate Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum, with its extensive collections, knowledgeable staff, community-focused programming, and newly remodeled exhibits. In my department, I am the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS). I frankly think that being the DUS is the best department job to have, as Yale’s impressive reputation is due to its incredible undergraduate student body. My life is rounded out by being a mother of three kiddos, which keeps me constantly in awe of the sheer fortitude of humanity. Raising tiny humans is tough! If we can raise babies, we can certainly (and must) do a better job protecting mother Earth.