Lauren Sallan: Early Career Award |
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February 9, 2016, Volume 62, No. 22 |
Lauren Sallan, assistant professor of earth & environmental science, in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences was an inaugural recipient of the Stensiö Award, which will be given to researchers in early vertebrate palaeontology. Named after Swedish paleozoologist Erik Stensiö, who died in 1984, the Stensiö Award was proposed and approved at the previous symposium in Dallas, Texas in 2011. It recognizes the research and impact of a scholar within 10 years of receiving a PhD. Dr. Sallan and Sophie Sanchez of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, received the award last summer at the 13th International Symposium on Early and Lower Vertebrates in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr. Sallan’s research looks at how global events, environmental change and ecological interactions affect long-term evolution (macroevolution) in early vertebrates, the ray-finned fishes that make up half of vertebrate diversity, and marine ecosystems through time. She tests her hypotheses using methods ranging from “big data” quantitative approaches and mathematical modeling to studying the fossil record of fishes and reconstructing the pattern of relationships among organisms.
In November, Dr. Sallan and her lab published a paper in Science that described how a mass extinction 359 million years ago known as the Hangenberg event triggered a drastic and lasting transformation of Earth’s vertebrate community. Before the event, large creatures were the norm, but for at least 40 million years afterward, the oceans were dominated by markedly smaller fish. The story was covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Discovery News, ScienceNow, Daily Mail, Der Spiegel and others. In October her paper showing that the ancient shark Bandringa seems to have lived both in fresh and marine water won the Taylor and Francis Award for Best Paper (second place) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Dr. Sallan earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2012, and came to Penn in the fall of 2014 from the University of Michigan, where she had taught ecology and evolutionary biology.
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