Research

Citizen Science Engagement

Want to contribute to science, but don't have a laboratory, goggles, or flask of bubbling chemicals? You still can make a difference!

Citizen science apps allow everyday people to act as eyes and ears for research projects. These programs are freely available on Android and iOS and harness the power of the public to measure everything from sea life to faraway planets.

Students who are interested in getting hands-on with real data are welcome to talk to me about getting started, or check out any of these projects on their own. (Ages 13+)

Planet Hunters: discover planets orbiting other stars by reading graphs of the star's brightness over time

Since 2010, Planet Hunters has used NASA Kepler data to discover over 90 planets!

FathomVerse: identify different kinds of sea life to help train a machine learning algorithm to do it too

FathomVerse "gamifies" research, letting you solve levels and go on "expeditions" to unlock more content.

NeMO-Net: help train NASA's supercomputer to map the area of coral reefs in seafloor photos

This is another "gamified" citizen science tool, where your puzzle-solving skills provide training data for machine learning applications.

iNaturalist: a social network where hundreds of thousands of users around the world record and report plants and animals they observe in the wild

iNaturalist's community has contributed over 94 MILLION research-quality observations to a publicly accessible dataset scientists can use.

Globe at Night: help monitor levels of light pollution by making observations of the night sky

Light pollution affects public health as well as a wide variety of animals, such as birds, insects, and even sea turtles! This is a major environmental issue in the NYC area.

Publications

Jacobs, G. S., Jacquet, S. M., Selly, T., Schiffbauer, J. D., & Huntley, J. W. (2024). Resolving taphonomic and preparation biases in silicified faunas through paired acid residues and X-ray microscopy. PeerJ, 12, e16767. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16767

Huntley, J. W., De Baets, K., Scarponi, D., Linehan, L. C., Epa, Y. R., Jacobs, G. S., & Todd, J. A. (2021). Bivalve mollusks as hosts in the fossil record. The evolution and fossil record of parasitism: coevolution and paleoparasitological techniques, 251-287. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52233-9_8

Jacobs, G. S., & Carlucci, J. R. (2019). Ontogeny and shape change of the phacopid trilobite Calyptaulax. Journal of Paleontology, 93(6), 1105-1125. https://doi.org/10.1017/jpa.2019.38

Research Projects

I'm in the process of preparing some simple invertebrate paleontology projects that I can run in a high school lab on a shoestring budget, probably involving trilobites or other Paleozoic invertebrates. Once I do, I will have research opportunities available for students interested in labwork or data analysis; participants can earn authorship credits on any papers resulting from this.

Watch this space!

EB18-04-C2 seg rotate.avi

This animation shows a 3D X-ray microscope image of fossils made of opal (blue) and pyrite (red) inside a chunk of rock.

This imagery comes from my dissertation, and was collected at the University of Missouri X-ray Microanalysis Core.

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