May 31, 2023
The research team, including Stewart Edie (PhD’18) with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Katie Collins with the U.K.’s Natural History Museum, and Sharon Zhou, a fourth-year undergraduate student at UChicago, went through the fossil record to get a picture of how the bivalves evolved new forms and ways of living. “For example, you can look at the shape of the shell and tell if they are likely digging into the seafloor sediment, because they become long and thin for burrowing,” explained Zhou.
They pieced together a comprehensive picture of the bivalves’ evolution—and were surprised.
“You might think that they would take immediate advantage of this new body design and go on to fame and biological fortune,” said David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences at UChicago and co-corresponding author on the paper. “But they didn’t.”
What kept them out of the evolutionary spotlight? Read here!
May 16, 2023
When she was just 16 years old, she got her pilot’s license. She did not realize then that having her head in the clouds was exactly where she would be in the future—predicting Earth’s future climate by studying the atmosphere and using the laws of physics.
As a professor at UChicago, Shaw’s research focuses on the physics of climate change. Her work involves a multi-pronged approach. She develops new theories for the response to climate change, models future climate using the laws of physics and quantifies emerging signals in observations related to climate change.
A major focus has been uncovering the role water plays in shaping atmospheric motions like the jet stream and storms that shape our day-to-day weather. Using this new perspective, her recent work explained for the first time why the Southern Hemisphere is stormier than the Northern Hemisphere.
May 16, 2023
This paper is one of the first major studies done using three-dimensional images of bivalve shells. The Maroon sat down with scientists Katie S. Collins, Stewart M. Edie, and David Jablonski to talk more about their research and findings.
Jablonski credits the success of the paper to his partnership with Collins and Edie. “It has been a blast working with them,” Jablonski said. “They’re wonderful, wonderful colleagues—ridiculously smart […] It’s been this really fruitful, mutually reinforcing, and complementary kind of collaboration that has been really rewarding...Our team also includes some great undergraduates.”
“[Bivalves] are common, they have a long fossil record, their morphology is super informative, they’re understudied because they’re kind of difficult, and they give you all this data about the evolution of ecosystems through time." Collins said.
Great write up for the Chicago Maroon by undergrad Jenna Moor!