Hello. I’m Becca, a SPIRE Postdoctoral Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill and member of the Kier lab.
I would like to be a professor who balances teaching and research. As a SPIRE fellow, I have learned state-of-the-art teaching methods, enriching the experiences I already have (such as teaching an adult education course on the History of Life) by working with students in the lab and offering guest lectures in college classrooms. An added benefit is that SPIRE fellows teach at historically minority universities within North Carolina, actively promoting and supporting under-represented members of the scientific community. I’ll begin teaching in January of 2006.
My research explores why organisms change their shapes through time and space. Most of my work involves sea shells, specifically snails from a group called neogastropods that has thousands of species throughout the world’s oceans. Neogastropods also have a rich fossil record extending back at least 140 million years ago. As you can imagine, the thousands of neogastropod species from today’s oceans and from the fossil record have thousands of different shell shapes. But why are there so many species and so many shapes? To answer these questions, I’ve developed methods for quantifying shell shapes and statistically comparing groups of shells. Currently, my main projects (1) model the energy trade-offs associated with the evolution of different shell shapes and (2) assess the diversity of neogastropod shell shapes in the North-Eastern Pacific.