Katie is a PhD student in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, and she has been working with the ASOM team for the past year. She has been conducting pollen analysis on rock hyrax middens, in order to reconstruct past vegetation communities and changes in their composition through the mid-Holocene to present.
Katie has just been awarded three research grants to support further paleoclimatic analysis of the leaf wax isotopes from the hyrax middens to better understand changes in rainfall in the past. She has received two departmental grants; The Michael Loudin Family Graduate Scholarship (1000 USD), and The R.J. Cuffey Fund for Paleontology (4000 USD), and the Elsevier Research Scholarship, co-sponsored by the journal Organic Geochemistry and the European Association of Organic Geochemists (3000 Euro).
Congratulations Katie!