UB Paleoclimate Dynamics Team

The UB Paleoclimate Dynamics team, led by Prof. Elizabeth Thomas, has much to celebrate this year, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. This includes our recent graduates: Allison Cluett (PhD ’21, starting an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Northern Arizona University), Kayla Hollister (UB Geology BS ’19, MS ’21, starting a PhD program at Notre Dame), and Arden Croft and Jiawei Jiang (both MS ’21, co advised by Prof. Mitchell). Devon Gorbey (PhD student) received an Outstanding Mention for her Geological Society of America student research proposal (to the top 10 proposals submitted that year) and Kurt Lindberg (PhD student) received a Geological Society of America AGeS2 grant. Congratulations!

We’ve also had some awesome undergrads working with us: Katie Lovell, Delaney Murphy, and Isabelle Mahar. I am delighted that two graduate students, Harleena Franklin (a UB Schomburg Fellow) and Hannah Holtzman, will be joining our team this fall. Several of us are excited to get back into the field in Alaska and Arctic Canada this summer after a pandemic-related break last year. We’ve been working with samples from pre-2020 field seasons in a smoothly running lab, thanks to Owen Cowling (MS ’18), our lab manager.

We’re also starting some new research, funded by an NSF CAREER grant to Prof. Thomas, on the response of Western New York to past and present rapid climate change (one of our goals is to figure out the Holocene history of lake effect snowstorms!). We’ll be coring lakes and collecting water and plant samples in Western New York during the next several years. If you’re in town and want to join us for field work, let us know! Check out the latest about our research at www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/Faculty/ekthomas/and follow Elizabeth on Twitter @Elizotope.

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