Congratulations Mary L. Droser of @UCRiverside, winner of the 2022 @theNASciences in Early Earth and Life Sciences-Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal for her prominent role in advancing understanding of the Ediacaran and Paleozoic life and environment!
Rachel Surprenant, a second year PhD student in the Droser Lab, was awarded the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship for her proposal "Leveraging regional and global records of Ediacaran tubular taxa to pinpoint the nature and dynamics of metazoan success at the dawn of animal life".
The abstract for the research project can be found on page ten of the award announcement (link below). Rachel's proposal was one of 32 national selections made by NASA's Planetary Science division in 2021.
This paper received an exciting amount of attention in the press, from a UC Riverside press release to an article in popular mechanics!
Figure 1 from Evans et al. 2021
"Holozoan phylogeny with inferred placement of representative White Sea taxa (dashed boxes) based on developmentally relevant characters (1–5, black box)."