I'm currently teaching a class in collections-based exhibit design at UC Davis. My students are using specimens from the fossil teaching collection to design exhibits. When they're done, they will be featured on the collection website -- watch this space for more updates!

In conjunction with the Ethical Open Science RCN, I am also working on several projects reflecting on the ethics and practicalities of different types of data in the Quaternary earth sciences, in particular with reference to the FAIR and CARE principles.

My last research project was on variation in small mammal paleocommunities from the late Quaternary of North America (NSF grant 2149416), working at UC Merced with Jessica Blois, Marta Jarzyna, and André Bellvé. I assembled radiocarbon chronologies for several thousand fossil collections based on data in NeotomaDB, xDD, and other sources. This paper is now out in Nature Scientific Data. André has also written two papers from this project; the first is in Our new collaborator, Hikaru Keebler, will use these data to model the constituent range distributions to understand community trait distributions.

Links to my projects on Github:

• 14C chronologies for Quaternary small mammal fossil assemblages
• Rancho La Brea vertebrate paleo research
• Text-mining for specimen numbers in GeoDeepDive
• Main page for Paleobiology Database (note: I did not build most of this)
• Graphical interface for Paleobiology Database (note: same as previous)
• Intro. to Life Sciences laboratory manual
• Some random geology lessons