Here is a list of all the accepted symposia for IPC7. Although conveners have already identified several potential speakers, you are still welcome to present in the symposia if your work falls within the ambit of the symposium. Please click on the download tab to get more details about the symposium and to find the contact details of the organisers.
Paul M. Barrett is an UKRI Individual Merit Researcher and Head of Science Engagement at the Natural History Museum, London. Prior to this, he held appointments at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. An internationally recognized expert on the evolution and biology of dinosaurs and other extinct reptiles, he has published almost 250 scientific papers and books. He has worked on museum collections around the world and conducted fieldwork in China, the UK, USA, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Over the course of his career, Paul has trained and mentored dozens of graduate students and postdocs. He has received several professional awards, including the President’s Medal of the Palaeontological Association and the Bicentennial Medal of the Linnean Society. In addition to scientific work, Paul is an enthusiastic science communicator, via the NHM’s exhibitions and public programmes and the UK and international media. He is the author of 'National Geographic Dinosaurs', ‘Dippy: The Tale of a Museum Icon’, ‘Dinosaurs: How they Lived and Evolved’ and, most recently, ‘A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils’.
I am an Assistant Professor and the PI of the PaLEO Lab in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. My lab at Hopkins challenges the paradigm of the ‘Molecular Gap’ between life, past and present, through conceptual and technological innovation enabling the experimental, empirical, and theoretical deduction of first principles that determine biological signal preservation across physical parameter spaces on Earth and other solar system bodies; we work to translate these insights into novel, integrative and agnostic biosignatures which can be applied to explore the foundational mechanisms driving the origin(s) and long-term evolution of life in response to environmental and ecosystem change! Previously, I completed postdoctoral training at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago (Agouron Postdoctoral Fellowship), after holding appointments at Caltech (Trimble & Barr Postdoctoral Fellowships), Yale University (MPhil & PhD in EPS; 2016-2021), the University of Bonn (BSc in Geosciences; MSc in Evolutionary Biology; 2011-2014), and the Technical University of Dortmund (Junior Excellence Scholarship in Chemistry; 2007-2011). Website: https://www.jasminawiemann.com/
As an ichnologist, Gabriela Mángano works at the crossroad of Paleobiology and Sedimentology. She is particularly interested in how animal-sediment interactions have helped shape the evolution of the biosphere. She has worked in marine, marginal marine and continental environments, in rocks ranging from the Precambrian to the Holocene. Gabriela has been recognized by several prestigious awards. Her extensive publication record includes 6 books, and over 300 papers and book chapters. She has supervised or co-supervised more than 50 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. After finishing her PhD in Argentina, Gabriela Mángano spent 4 years as a postdoc in the USA, and after a brief stint back in Argentina as a CONICET researcher, she moved to Canada in 2004. Currently she is a Distinguished Professor and the George J. McLeod Enhancement Chair at the Department of Geological Sciences of the University of Saskatchewan. Gabriela has served as co-editor for PALAIOS and Sedimentology. She is currently Co-Editor for Lethaia. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Ameghiniana, Journal of Paleontology, PALAIOS, Palaeo-3, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, and Swiss Journal of Palaeontology. She was also a member of the Scientific Board of the UNESCO International Geoscience Program (IGCP) and is a Voting Member of the International Subcommissions on Cambrian Stratigraphy and Ordovician Stratigraphy.
Ornella Bertrand research focuses on the evolution of the brain and other sensory organs of mammals. Her interdisciplinary approach brings together paleontology, neurobiology, and sensory ecology. Ornella uses modern phylogenetic comparative methods to study when and how fast, senses (e.g., vision, olfaction, balance) have changed throughout time in mammalian evolution. After completing her Masters in France, she was awarded the Annette Kade Fellowship at the AMNH in New York. Thereafter, she completed her PhD in 2016, and did a postdoc at the University of Toronto, where she specialized on the neurosensory evolution of rodents. Later, she obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh where she expanded her research to study the senses of early placental mammals. Subsequently, she received the Beatriu de Pinós contract at ICP in Spain, where she will start her own lab with a Ramón y Cajal contract in September 2025. Ornella has a strong publication record that includes over 30 peer-reviewed articles (one accepted) and 4 book chapters. She also has impressive fieldwork experience in Madagascar, USA (New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana), Morocco, Spain, and France. Ornella has supervised/co-supervised 9 students, and she is currently co-supervising a PhD student on the neurosensory evolution of dinosaurs. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and has done 75 peer-reviewed for various academic journals and has served on scientific committees such as for the European Association of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Biology and Geology at Macalester College, where she received the Jack and Marty Rossman Award for Excellence in Teaching. She completed her BSc in Biology at Montana State University, and her PhD in Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. She specializes in the long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods and has traveled around the globe in search of their bones. Kristi was awarded an NSF CAREER grant to investigate the effects of environmental stress on the bones of vertebrates. She is the author of more than 50 scholarly articles, has published two articles in Scientific American, and is an editor of a book titled The Sauropods: Paleobiology and Evolution. She is the Vice President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, She has been a consultant and on-screen expert for programs aired on PBS, BBC Horizon, the Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Channel, and recently appeared in her first IMAX film (Maximo!). Kristi is also a professor for Wondrium, and her course “Rediscovering the Age of Dinosaurs” has gained recent critical acclaim.
Dr. Christian Kammerer is Research Curator of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, USA. His research centers on terrestrial faunas at the juncture between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras, particularly concerning mass extinctions and the origin of mammals. Much of his career has been devoted to studying the taxonomic diversity, palaeobiology, and evolutionary history of the Permo-Triassic synapsids of the Karoo Basin. His doctoral work at the University of Chicago, in the laboratory of Neil Shubin, used the exceptionally rich record of synapsid crania to analyze morphological disparity of the group over time. During subsequent postdoctoral work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, he examined the origins of novel anatomical features in synapsids using CT-data. His field programs span four continents, but are currently focused close to home on some extremely productive Late Triassic sites in the Chatham Group of North Carolina.
Workshop leaders:
- Dr Lewis A. Jones, University College London (Lewis.Jones@ucl.ac.uk)
- Dr Bethany Allen, GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (bethany.janet.allen@gfz.de)
- Dr Harriet B. Drage, University of Lausanne & University of Geneva (harriet.drage@unil.ch)
Summary:
R is one of the most popular languages in the world of data science and has been widely adopted by the palaeobiological community to clean, analyse and plot data. General familiarity with R allows users to expand the potential of their research and automate routine tasks. Importantly, it allows researchers to improve the reproducibility of their research and document their analyses.
This workshop will introduce attendees to palaeoverse, an R package which supports data preparation and exploration for palaeobiological analysis, improving code reproducibility and accessibility. The event will focus on introducing databases (e.g. Paleobiology Database) and building workflows in R (e.g. data cleaning) using palaeoverse.
As part of the workshop, we will run through a live coding session, addressing a palaeobiological research question. This event will provide a great opportunity for attendees to meet and network with computational palaeobiologists and gain experience working collaboratively in R to generate reproducible research.
