We have had some recent developments in the PAST Lab.
Becky Hood, one of our undergraduate students in the lab, recently presented at The Louisiana State University Undergraduate Research Conference 2012 (URC). On top of it all Becky took home first place for oral presentations in the social sciences! Her oral presentation titled "Age and Season of Growth for Mesodesma donacium from the Nepeña Valley, Coastal Peru" presented work that she completed over the summer in the PAST Lab. Her abstract can be found here. Here is a brief bio on our departments website:
Becky worked with David Chicoine and Kristine DeLong on a sclerochronology project with the clam shell Mesodesma donacium from the Nepeña Valley in coastal Peru. Becky traveled to Peru and worked with Dr. Chicoine to recover and catalog shell remains from three archaeological sites. She worked with Dr. DeLong in the PAST lab to measure the shell cohort for comparison analysis. Then, she made a cross-section of one of the largest clams and counted the tidal bands in the surf clam. Becky determined the clam lived 99 days, which is considerably shorter than other locations farther south of Nepeña Valley. Becky completed her research in the summer ASPIRE program of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Here is a photo we snapped this summer of Beck busy with shell processing.
Our great and fearless leader is also now officially published in Nature Climate Change! Yes this is a repost, we are just so excited about it we have to tell you about it more than once. Her research has made it to the front page of lsu.edu! The write up can be found at this link. It looks good to see our research out there. Her article can be found here. We have received a great deal of support from the scientific community since the paper was published in late October. We have even had some comments on the beautiful graphs used in the paper. Trust me I aspire to one day have graphs that look that pretty.
Feel free to leave us comments on the new publication!
