David Blackburn is very pleased to announce that, after careful review by the Awards Committee (Gavin Naylor, Advait Jukar, Ed Stanley, Mandee Hall, and Hong-Shan Wang), the following proposals submitted to the NH Fall 2024 Travel Award Competition have been funded:
Graduate Students
The 2024 Fall Graduate Student Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History using funds from the Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowment and the B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment. If you would like to help support these funds for future student awards, please go to:
Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowed Fellowship
B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment
Magdalynne Alley (Advisor: Neill Wallis)
Will receive funds to travel to the S E Archaeology Conference meetings to be held in Williamsburg Virginia where she will present a paper on her findings related to indigenous ceramic and cultural trends in NE Florida and Southern Georgia.
Kelsey Fenner (Advisor: Ed Stanley)
Will receive funds to support fieldwork and attend a conference in the Cape Fold Mountains of South Africa.
Nick Gardner (Advisor: Scott Robinson)
Will present a poster on his research at the BES conference Liverpool, UK. entitled: Responses of Understory and Terrestrial Birds to seasonal Flooding in the Peruvian Amazon.
Jacob Idec (Advisor: Rob Guralnick)
Will receive funds to support travel to the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Holland where he will deliver two oral presentations about his AI work and where he will work with resident researchers to discuss ideas about how to best leverage citizen science data to generate insights abou the biology and evolution of dragonflies.
Stephanie Killingsworth (Advisor: Bruce MacFadden)
Will present a poster on her research at the SVP meetings in Minneapolis entitled “Harnessing Machine Learning to Detect Macroevolutionary Transitions in Neogene Fossil Horses (Family Equidae) in North America.”
Pamod Heshan Liyanadegara (Advisor: Michal Kowalewski)
Will receive funds to support their field work to address the research question “Determining Suitability of Geometric Morphometrics as a taxonomic tool to differentiate Encope abberens from Encope michelini” (species of sand dollars).
Thomas Murphy (Advisor: Lucas Majure)
Will receive funds to help with travel to give a presentation at the XII Congreso Colombiano Botanica in Popayan Colombia.
Taylor Pierson (Advisor: Jaret Daniels)
Will give an oral presentation on her research at the Entomological Society of America Meetings in Phoenix, Arizona entitled “Creating Conservation Genomics Resources for an imperiled butterfly.”
Mitchell Reigler (Advisor: Jon Bloch)
Will give an oral presentation on his research at the SVP meetings in Minneapolis entitled “The fossil record of worm-lizards (Squamata Amphisbaena) across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of the Big Horn Basin, Wyoming.”
Undergraduate Students
The 2024 Fall Undergraduate Student Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History using funds from the Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowment and the B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment. If you would like to help support these funds for future student awards, please go to:
Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowed Fellowship
B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment
Amelia Keriazes (Advisor Scott Robinson)
Will receive funds to help with travel to attend American Ornithological Society annual meetings in Estes Park, Colorado.
Shion Newsom. (Advisor: Jon Bloch)
Will receive funds to help with travel to attend the SVP meetings in Minneapolis.
Joanna Page (Advisor: Steve Manchester)
Will receive funds to help with travel to conduct research at Missouri Botanical Gardens to use landmark based approaches to assist with the classification of fossil roses assigned to the genus Rubus.
Postdocs
The 2024 Fall Postdoc Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History.
Ivone de Bem Oliveira (Advisor: Jaret Daniels)
Will receive funds to travel to the Entomological Society of America where she will give a presentation entitled “Leveraging High Throughput genomics to aid imperiled insect conservation.”
Bert Foquet (Advisor: Akito Kawahara)
Will receive funds to travel to the Entomological Society of America to present a talk entitled “Insights from comparative transcriptomics in the evolution of silk.”
Paul Masonick (Advisor: Akito Kawahara)
Will receive funds to travel to the Dresden meeting of Insect Phylogeny where he will present a talk entitled “Convergent evolution of antipredatory traits in bombycoid moths (Lepidoptera).”
Collections Managers & Scientific Staff (CMSS)
The 2024 Fall CMSS Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History.
Megan Fry (NAGPRA)
Will receive funds to help with travel to the University of New Hampshire Dept. of Anthropology to receive NAGPRA training in best practices for recording osteological inventories in association with tribal consultation.
Jennifer Green (South Florida Archaeology)
Will receive funds to attend the annual meeting of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums.
Chase Kimmel (Lepidoptera)
Will receive funds to travel to the Entomological Society of America meetings where he will give a presentation entitled “New insights into the ecology of Osmia calaminthae, and imperiled bee species in Florida.”
Rachel Narducci (Vertebrate Paleontology)
Will receive funds to help with travel to attend the SVP meetings in Minneapolis where she will give a presentation entitled ”Methods for the Removal of Very large fossil 1000 plaster jackets.”
Rob Robins (Ichthyology)
Will receive travel support funds to speak at Reef Environmental Foundation where he will give a presentation entitled “The Reef Fishes of Gainesville, Florida.”