Meghan A. Balk, Ph.D.

Traits are the intersection of evolutionary history and ecological interactions. I am interested the evolutionary consequences of ecological and environmental processes. I use the modern and fossil record to investigate trait and environment evolution. I  seek to understand trait evolution and variation across time, levels of biotic organization, and habitats.

I utilize museum collections and am passionate about preserving and making these invaluable resources available.  I mobilize collection data through imaging, enabling metadata standards, and constructing machine learning workflows to preserve and enable FAIR data for continued exploration of data-driven science.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico under Dr. Felisa Smith where I gained experience in vertebrate anatomy and macroecology. While there, I was an scholar at NESCent supervised by Dr. Craig McClain, where I investigated evolutionary dynamics of biotic interactions. Previously, I held two postdoc appointments: at the National Museum of Natural History with Dr. Matt Carrano, where I applied further investigated biotic interactions at the community and clade levels; and at the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, where I gained experience in data science and ontologies. I took a break from traditional academics and worked for the National Ecological Observatory Network applying computer vision to extract traits from images. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Evolutionary Paleobiology Group at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway and I am applying my previous experience to extract traits to investigate within-lineage evolutionary dynamics.  

Check out my Research tab for a list of current projects. 

See my full CV here.