Maggie and I have been working with an undergraduate student, Audrey, to come up with a project for her last semester at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Audrey is a geology major and has an additional concentration in early childhood education. I’ve had a project that I’ve been absolutely dying to get started and I thought, what a perfect candidate for this endeavor.
Last year when we were packing up the department collection, I found these really beautiful large foraminifera models. Coincidentally, Audrey actually helped us pack these specimens up. As we know from reading Adriane’s research section (here), foraminifera are microfossils. We use microscopes to see these very small creatures. Microscopes are difficult to use in a classroom setting because even if you set them up in focus, it is very easy for someone to accidentally put it out of focus or move the slide. This makes it difficult for each student to have the same experience.
Setting up one of our enlarged Foraminifera models to scan with our NextEngine 3D laser scanner.By having gigantic models, we can discuss details or shapes of these forams without having to look under a microscope. So, the project idea is to use our 3D laser scanner to create digital 3D models of these super big foraminifera models. Audrey will develop lesson plans that will incorporate these specimens into them. The ultimate goal will be to make the object files that contain the digital fossils and accompanying lesson plans available for teachers to download for free online.
We have done a few test scans and to see the exact specifications we should use for the models. In order to get the details of the specimens you have to rotate the model so that the areas where it’s being held on the stand can also be scanned. You can then combine the different angles into one model. The digital fossil can then be manipulated and moved around in 3D space. Now that the semester is wrapping up we will begin to scan these models more often so Audrey’s project can take off running next semester.
Colin simulating how early amphibians would do push ups.
This past summer I participated in Tennessee’s Governor’s Schools for the Sciences and Engineering program. Governor’s School is an intense month of coursework for high school students. For the month, the students live on campus in one of the dorms, take a few classes, and get to experience how college would be! I participate in many different outreach activities but the high school age range is one that I have not worked with very often. Most of the students I have worked with are 3rd-5th grade levels.
Sarah, one of our collaborators, and I were the teaching assistants for the course on “Vertebrate Evolution”. We helped the students with activities related to the lectures and pulled specimens out of our fossil collection for the students to examine.The course was structured as a walk through the evolution of vertebrates through time with emphasis on what specific features join groups of animals. It was a lot of fun to learn about vertebrate evolution, as I work on invertebrates. It was also a great experience getting to work with high school students. We took them on several class trips: tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ripley’s Aquarium, and Zoo Knoxville.
Part of the Governor’s School gang at the zoo!
Class met for 3 hours every afternoon for a month, it was a lot! By the end of the month both the students and instructors were all very exhausted. The students had a final project that they presented as posters on the last day of class. It was so fun to hear about all of the great animal groups they researched. One of the most rewarding things about experiences like this is learning from your students. I have so much respect for K-12 teachers.
I simply do not have the mental or physical capacity to work with young students for an entire day. Thank a teacher for their dedication to educating our youth – it is a terribly difficult job that so many wonderful people excel at.
We are both writing up National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals. A proposal is a submitted document to any money granting agency. If the proposal is approved, the scientist(s) or educators who submitted the proposal is then awarded a grant in the form of money. Jen is submitting a grant for postdoctoral fellowship programs (postdocs are commonly 1-3 year appointments where you are further trained in research and writing after receiving your Ph.D.), and Adriane is writing up a full proposal with her advisor and colleagues to get funding for part of her dissertation (the document that is written for fulfillment of a Ph.D. program).
But before we go into the parts of an NSF proposal and how they are written, a bit more background about what these things are. In short, large grants (such as NSF or NASA) are the necessity of a researcher’s life. They are really large grants, usually on the order of ~$30,000 to sometimes over $2 million, that fund a scientists’ research, salary, and often the salary of their graduate students. There are different NSF programs; these can be thought of as different categories to which you can submit a proposal to. For example, Adriane is submitting a proposal to Marine Geology & Geophysics, a program that is great at funding all sorts of paleoceaonographic research.
If the scientist who wins the grant works at a university, the university takes part of the grant money for operating costs. This is fair, as the scientists use electricity, water, etc. in their labs, and the university also employs people to clean the buildings and grounds. Because the money from NSF grants comes, in part, from taxpayer monies, the entire review process a submitted proposal will go through is very rigorous. The granting agency wants to be sure taxpayer dollars are going towards research that will lead to the betterment of society in some way, or will fill a knowledge gap in the sciences that will open the doors for further research and development.
OK, now back to the parts of an NSF proposal:
Although we are submitting for very different purposes the format is relatively similar. There is a project summary that is a one page summary of your entire project. This is basically a one-page summary of your proposal, what you bring to the scientific community, and how you will provide something to the public through your work.
Figure from Jen’s recent postdoctoral fellowship proposal. She is interested in identifying how minor shape changes are shown in the skeletal elements of blastoids. Each plate circlet has a different color and as you can see on each of the blastoids the pattern quite different. These differences in plate shapes and sizes greatly affect how the organism would feed and breathe. The time periods that each animal lived are written below the specimens. This means that these differences continue through time, indicating an importance either evolutionarily or ecologically.
The project description is the full proposal that includes an introduction/background, your objectives and goals, the methods you will use, and the significance of the project. In addition, it includes lots of images and tables to justify why you want to do the science. Depending on the program you are submitting to there may be other things you need to incorporate into the project description. For example, Jen had to include an institution justification, professional development, and career training into her fellowship applications. To put this simply, why should you go where you are proposing to go – what does the school have that will help you succeed is the institution justification. Professional development means how will Jen grow as an academic while at the proposed institution – with details of projects or other mentoring opportunities. Career training goes hand in hand with professional development, this could be workshops or certificate programs that Jen can enroll in while at the proposed institution.
Adriane experiencing writer’s block on a Sunday morning. We can’t emphasize enough that these proposals do take a lot of time, and although they are lots of work, it is a huge honor to produce a successful NSF proposal!
Although the primary portion of the proposal is the project description, there are a series of additional files you must compile. The budget justification is a place to outline a detailed budget for the proposed project and explain what the funds are being used. Biographical sketches of the submitting members are required as well. This is a short summary of your education, training, publications, and other activities usually fit onto two pages. Collaborators and affiliations must be outlined as individuals that will not be asked to review your proposal. During the rigorous review process, NSF wants evaluation of proposals to be as unbiased and fair as possible, so they ask for a comprehensive list of all collaborators over the past several years. The data management plan outlines what will happen with all the data collected. This is particularly important because a key aspect of science is reproducibility (=the ability to reproduce another scientists’ results using their data).
So, there are a lot of pieces to writing an NSF proposal, and a lot of time goes into writing one! But probably the most important aspect to come out of research funded by the public is the ability for researchers and scientists to give back to the public in some way – whether that be through volunteering, lectures and teaching, or making fun websites to explain the science we are most passionate about so that everyone has access to our information 🙂
Discussing teeth next to the T. rex replica in the geology gallery!This past summer I was given the opportunity to redesign a summer camp that has been taught at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture for many years. I spent a long time going over the previous content from the summer camp and making it more engaging for the students. This meant coming up with new activities and crafts to keep the students occupied for three hours a day for one week.
The museum staff and I worked hard to promote the summer camp alongside the other camp for older students, Archaeokids! Archaeokids was a similar camp as the fossil camp but focused on archaeology rather than paleontology. Both archaeology and paleontology are fantastic sciences to get young students excited about learning. Both fields involve active learning by engaging the students with specimens from dig sites or fossil localities! I was asked to do a short interview to promote my camp to get more students enrolled, you can view it here.
Starting our sediment excavation outside on a beautiful day! The students also learned the importance of note taking.Each day of the summer camp had a different theme that we could organize activities around. Here were the different themes in order: Fossils and fossil formation, rocks and the rock cycle, vertebrate anatomy, trace fossils, and artistic license and interpretation. The last activity of every day was exploring sediment to identify different animals that would have been found in the ancient environment. We had two teams one had sediment from the Ordovician and the other from the Mississippian. The first day we spent focusing on surface collection, just using our eyes to collect fossils from the pile of sediment. The following two days were spent sieving the sediment to see how things changed when we looked at a specific size of sediment and animals. The students really enjoyed being able to pick through the sediment to find the critters.
Exploring geologic time and taking about events that happened along the time scale.The culmination of our sediment excavation was to draw out the environment that the sediment is recording. They were able to use a fossil guidebook that I made for them and the gallery exhibits of the reconstructed environments. They then were able to present their environments to their friends and discuss the differences! Both environments had some similar and some different animals. They got to pass around the different ones and talk about them. It was a very successful week and we all had a lot of fun!
Our lab group (at the time) had three students, Sarah, myself (Jen), and Ryan. Each of us work on a different type of echinoderm (sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars). Sarah works on these strange creatures called diploporitans, Ryan works on heart urchins, and I work on blastoids! We did an exhibit showcasing each of the different things that we do with our fossils. This ranges from finding new fossils on field excursions, visiting museums to study their collections, or running new experiments. Even though we study different organisms from different time periods, we all share a similar goal: to better understand these animals so that we can better assess relationships through time.
A photo of our echinoderm exhibit at the McClung Museum.
Lightning or elevator talks are a great way to practice quickly sharing your research or work. Elevator talks are just as they sound, use the amount of time an elevator ride takes to share your research with another person. This is usually about 1-3 minutes, sometimes less! You can think of it sort of like a TV or radio commercial about what you do.
So, you want to make sure to share your science in a way that is not confusing to people in other scientific or academic fields. You want your research to be understandable to everyone, not just people that work on the same stuff as you. I find it helpful to pretend I’m talking to my mom who has a general understanding of what I work on but doesn’t particularly need to understand all of the minute details.
Below is my first official lightning talk. Since this is a video, I was able to include additional images and even an extra supporting additional video clip. I plan to produce a few a semester to practice communicating whatever my current research may be!
Here are some tools to begin crafting your own elevator talk!
Jen walking around with a Spinosaurus tooth.We went to a local elementary school to participate with the local Girls Inc. chapter in Knoxville. The goal was to get these young girls (K-5) excited about science and explore our science with them! We are both paleontologists so we brought a ton of really cool fossils and some of our common field equipment.
To begin, we had each of them draw a scientist. Many of them drew themselves conducting science! This is exactly what we were hoping for; often, girls will draw a male scientist rather than themselves or other females. We had a variety of scientists: engineers, botanists, aerospace engineers, soil scientists, oceanographers, and chemists! Many of them drew themselves out in the field or in a laboratory setting. It was very refreshing to see so many awesome career ideas from these young students.
Sarah walking around with a trilobite.We went through the basic field gear we bring out in the field: a hammer, sunscreen, a hat, a compass, a notebook, fossil guidebook, and pencils! We explained why we need this basic gear and how we use it in the field. We then discussed different types of fossils. To do this, we brought mostly large specimens that they could visualize the modern relatives. We walked around with each specimen, allowing the girls to make observations, touch the specimen, and think about what it could be. It’s always easiest to prompt them into figuring out what the specimen could be. We would ask “Is it a plant or an animal?” A very simple question but not always clear from the fossil record! We would then discuss specific features of the specimen. Are there patterns? Could you see any strange features? Does anything look like something you see today? The questions help the students interact with us and they were not afraid to speak up. It’s always such a pleasure to interact with young students that are so curious because they ask the best questions!
Cartoon blastoid cut in half so you can see the inside of the specimen. Each slice in the video is taken horizontal to the longest axis of the specimen. Figure modified from Dexter et al. (2008)As I briefly discuss on my research page, here, part of my main research focus is to better understand respiratory structures of extinct animals. I’ve embedded a video on how I actually go about doing this. I’m using acetate peels to trace the structures through the body. These are essentially thin slices that allow us to section or take pieces of the fossil bit by bit. There is a general agreement about where the respiratory structures of blastoids (called hydrospires) connect to the exterior of the body. This means I can find this location on the inside to find the structures.
Once I have identified the structures, I can trace each one! I use a drawing pad and it can actually be quite relaxing tracing the folds. But it takes a lot of time and we have thought about figuring out how to make the computer do it for us but in some cases the outline is faint or you can see extra folds that are not actually part of the layer you are on. This happens when the slices of the fossil are taken not exactly perpendicular to the long body axis. The slices that I am working with were made in the 1960s and were done by hand so it is common that they are not exactly perpendicular.
In the video below you can see me tracing the hydrospire folds on a slice of Pentremites pulchellus. Once we trace all of the folds we were interested in, we can hide the images of the slices and all that remains are a series of stacked line drawings. We use another program to create the three dimensional structures.
Citation: Dexter, T.A., Sumrall, C.D., and McKinney, M.L 2008. Allometric strategies for increasing respiratory surface area in the Mississippian blastoid Pentremites. Lethaia, 42, doi: 10.1111/j.1502-3931.2008.00110.x
All of us have taken wildly different journeys to get to where we are today. I’d like to share part of mine with you all and emphasize the importance of undergraduate research. Although I am currently in a geology PhD program I started out as a Biological Sciences major. When I started my undergraduate career I wanted to become an orthodontist – this slowly changed to medical examiner to I have no idea. The spring semester that I was supposed to graduate I took a course in the Earth and Environmental Science Department to fulfill my last 300-level course requirement. The course was “Introduction to Paleontology” with Dr. Roy Plotnick. I immediately became enamored with the content and scheduled a meeting to talk with him. He offered me a research assistant position to work in his lab and I accepted. I decided to stay for an additional year to get a minor in Earth and Environmental Science.
I did not know much about undergraduate research when I started out my new position as research assistant. Roy had several projects going on at the time. I started in on one working to assess how a specific type of brachiopod interacted with the seafloor. This involved me using a force gauge to measure the amount of force required to push the creature into various types of sediment. I also explored a specific type of crinoid holdfast (the part that secures them to the seafloor) and how it acted almost like an anchor. Roy gave me the freedom to explore the experimental process. He had a variety of tools and materials to experiment with and I was able to build different types of holdfasts and use the force gauge to drag them through different types of sediment. This was not only fun but it was a huge boost in my confidence. I was conducting my own experiments and collecting data.
A young, awkward Jen conducting undergraduate research in Dr. Roy Plotnick’s lab circa 2012.
I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in paleontology. I had become very interested in the extinction dynamics of the Late Devonian. I did an independent study with Roy examining the changes in cephalopod diversity during this dynamic time. I began applying for graduate school in all the wrong ways. I attempted to contact faculty members but they weren’t very good at emailing me back so I would go ahead and apply rather than attempt to contact them again. This mostly resulted in me losing a lot of money on applications. Many of the faculty I applied to work with simply had no funding for students that year. One day Roy brought in an article that was recently published in GSA Today by Dr. Alycia Stigall. This article was titled, Speciation collapse and invasive species dynamics during the Late Devonian “Mass Extinction” and, of course, sparked my interest. I exchanged several emails with Alycia before applying (late) to her program. A few months later I was accepted to work with Alycia for the fall of 2012. Thus, beginning my long journey through graduate school. Without the random chance encounter with Roy during my undergraduate career, I would not be where I am today. His encouragement, support, and enthusiasm provided the best working environment for me to officially become a scientist.
Not all undergraduate research experiences result in positive experiences as mine did. By reaching out to faculty members and participating in different research projects you will quickly find out what you like and dislike! There is no harm in talking to faculty or graduate students about your research interests. It is very likely that they have similar interests or know people that do.
Maggie and I recently traveled to Clayton-Bradley Academy to explore fossils and different animals with pre-K students. We have a set of fossils we usually bring with and a guideline of topics to hit with various age levels but planning for pre-K never works out! Exploring different fossil forms with young scientists! They had great questions.
We tried to keep it simple and hands-on. Each of the samples we brought with us was relatively large and the students were able to touch everything. We first showed them a sample of Lepidodendron – which is often mistaken for scales or dinosaur skin. We discussed how it was a plant, what the shapes meant, and how there is no plant material left.
We then examined various teeth and had the students compare them to their own teeth. The students could feel in their mouth and find the sharper versus flat teeth to compare to the fossils that they were exploring. We had a large mammoth molar that we passed around and most of the students thought that it was ribs from an animal. We oriented them and told them it was actually a tooth and to think about what sort of animal would have a tooth that big today. Younger children often have difficulty connecting words/names with the actual animal so we brought with images of these animals to help visually remind the students of what we are talking about. They couldn’t come to the conclusion of mammoth on their own but once we showed the image they remembered a similar animal from movies (mostly Ice Age) and you could see the wheels turning. It is always an adventure traveling to new schools and interacting with different age groups. It really tests your ability to modify your vocabulary and thought process.
Letting the young students touch some very old dinosaur teeth!
