SEPL People
Principal Investigator
Jenny McGuire
Jenny became an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in August 2017. She uses both modern and paleontological specimens to identify how populations, species, and communities have responded to past climate change. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible given rapidly shifting climates. She received her PhD from the Dept. of Integrative Biology at UC-Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Corentin Gibert-Bret
Corentin joined the SEPL in December 2022. He is working on the climate fidelity project to decipher the link between the distributions of North American mammals and plants in light of the extreme climatic fluctuation since the last glacial maximum (20 000 years ago). He is interested in how fossil mammalian communities were assembled and how niche and dispersal processes have shaped them over time. Corentin is focusing on using and developing analytical methods compatible with modern ecology and paleontology. He received his PhD from Lyon 1 University, France, in 2017 and conducted postdoctoral research in ecology, archeology, and paleontology labs.
Graduate Students
Katherine Slenker
Katie joined SEPL in the fall of 2022. She received her B.A. in Evolutionary Biology from Case Western Reserve University and her M.S. in Anatomy and Vertebrate Paleontology from Oklahoma State University. She has previously studied the response of large-bodied mammals to environmental drying, specifically looking at pronghorn headgear and the carotid rete. She is interested in the responses of large-mammal communities to increasing aridification under past and modern conditions.
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SEPL is not currently hiring PhD students. Keep an eye on our "Opportunities" page to see if things change.
Undergraduate Researchers
Anna Whitford
Anna began volunteering in with the lab in Fall 2019 at Fossil Fridays and started working in the lab in Fall 2020. She is a 2nd year majoring in Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is interested in maps, modeling, and species responses to climate change. In her free time, Anna enjoys visiting museums, drawing, and hunting for fossils. She looks forward to doing further research in the lab!
Eli Vazquez
Eli is a second undergraduate student majoring in the biological sciences. They began working in the SEPL lab in spring 2022. They have an interest in Ecology, Herpetology, Astrobiology and is excited to work on future ecology projects within the lab. In their free time, Eli enjoys drawing, running, and robotics.
Former SEPL People:
Graduate Students:
Julia Schap (Stengl-Wyer Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin)
Benjamin Shipley (NSF Postdoc at University of Oxford)
Daniel Lauer (Advanced Data Science Associate Consultant at Bala-Cynwyd)
Postdoctoral Scholars:
Silvia Pineda Munoz (Strategic Communications Advisor at Our World 2050; Founder & Science Communicator at Climate Ages)
Yue Wang (Associate Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University)
Rachel Short (Assistant Professor at South Dakota State University)
Leila Siciliano-Martina (Assistant Professor at Texas State University)
Lab technicians:
Aaron Woodruff (now at Florida Museum of Natural History)
Rukumani (Ruku) Rimal (GIS Analyst)
Undergraduate students:
Lily Turner, Audrey Dods, Amna Amir, Megan Wright, Jadyn Sethna, Kathryn McCarthy, Joe Miles, Amanda Meadows, Molly Guthrie, Victoria Contreras, Morgan Ganues, Tong Yu, Alissa Schlossberg (SoBS)
Riannon Colton (EAS)
Manu Regalado (CoE)
Daniel Do & Renee Bach (CoC)
Angelica Chukwudebe (Brown U)
Matthew Torres & Simone Siriani (Georgia State)