Student Opportunities
Currently seeking undergraduate student to count foraminifera from Holocene cores on the Texas continental shelf. This is a paid position. Please e-mail [email protected] for more info.
*Potentially* looking for a new graduate student for the Fall 2022 application cycle (to start in 2023)
Currently seeking undergraduate student to count foraminifera from Holocene cores on the Texas continental shelf. This is a paid position. Please e-mail [email protected] for more info.
*Potentially* looking for a new graduate student for the Fall 2022 application cycle (to start in 2023)
Lab Members
Dr. Chris Lowery
I am a Research Associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. I'm a micropaleontologist; I use the fossilized shells of microscopic marine organisms called foraminifera to study how the ocean, the organisms living in it, and global climate has changed in the past. This is incredibly fun and frankly I'm still surprised that I actually get paid to do it. I'm originally from Richmond, Virginia, and spent a lot of time as growing up camping, backpacking, and canoeing. When I went to college (at the University of Mary Washington, where I worked with Neil Tibert) I only knew I wanted to major in something that would get me a job where I could be outside part of the time. I chose geology over environmental science because I didn't want to take extra chemistry or biology classes (ironic, because as a paleontologist I now do a lot of ecology/biology, and geochemistry is a big part of my research), and because I loved my Geo101 course. I did an undergraduate research project on ostracodes from Mono Lake, California, and loved the microscope work. I also liked the idea of teaching, so I decided to go to grad school. I did a masters and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I was lucky enough to work with Mark Leckie. Mark got me hooked on foraminifera, the Cretaceous Western Interior Sea, and scientific ocean drilling. After graduation I got hired as the R.T. Buffler Postdoctoral Fellow at the UTIG, and was hired as a Research Associate when my postdoc ended. Postdoctoral Fellows Dr. Adam Woodhouse Adam is a UTIG Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow; his research is focused on linking the evolution of the Orbulina lineage to changes in sea surface temperature in the mid Miocene. Graduate Students Patricia Standring (PhD) Patty is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her research integrates biostratigraphy, isotope geochemistry, grain size, and XRF elemental data to reconstruct deep sea current flow across the Eocene-Oligocene transition and tie it to extinction in the foraminifera. Undergraduate Students Katherine Faulkner Kate Gilbreath Former Lab Members Solveig Schilling (MS 2022) Current Position: Geotechnical Engineer at Kleinfelder Solveig’s MS research, funded by the Texas General Land Office, was focused on using grain size and micropaleontological data from cores on the Texas shelf to map Holocene estuaries and identify buried sand resources |