Ryan Mohammed received his PhD in 2019 from the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago. His main interests are aquatic ecology and conservation, but his work with Pitch Lake and other aquatic asphaltic ecosystems led him to collaborate with scientists at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum (Los Angeles, CA).
The CPN student community is now 116 members strong, spanning a wide range of career stages, institutions, and disciplines. Together, our members represent 80 institutions across 22 countries. The Student Panel was created to help students connect with other members in the network, represent student perspectives within the CPN leadership, and organize resources, training opportunities, and other community-building activities to help prepare students for future careers in conservation paleobiology. In line with these goals, we’re very excited to announce TWO WAYS for student members to start engaging with the student community and interacting with other members in the network:
Lauren Clark has just completed the first year of her master’s in the Archaeology department at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is broadly interested in the applications and methods employed in ancient sediment DNA (sedaDNA) studies in service of both archaeology and conservation paleobiology. To combine her interests, she has chosen to focus her thesis research on comparing the efficacy of various extraction methods of sedaDNA among stored sediment samples obtained from the Bridge River archaeological site in interior BC. In order to acquire primarily ancient genetic material, the extraction of DNA from sediment will take place in a positive pressure lab facility and will follow strict clean-room protocols as Lauren is demonstrating in this photo in Simon Fraser’s ancient DNA lab.