Student Spotlights – 2024
Student Spotlights
Lauren Pinkard is an undergraduate whose impact is felt not only within the department but also in the city of Knoxville. As an environmental studies major with a minor in sustainable landscape design, her passion for science is a defining thread in her academic and professional journey.
Pinkard came to EPS in spring 2023 when she enrolled in Geology 101. Her academic excellence was quickly recognized, and she earned the Jimmy Walls Award for excellence in physical geology.
After consulting with her instructor, Lecturer Robert Jacobsen, Pinkard embarked on a summer internship. Her research explored the perceptions, interests, and expectations of students in introductory geology and environmental studies courses. Surveying approximately 900 students across five introductory courses, she unearthed a common desire among them: to explore careers that contribute to the betterment of the environment, society, and business.
These findings align with the geoscience education literature that emphasize students’ aspirations to make a meaningful impact in the world. Pinkard culminated her internship with an impressive presentation at the university’s Discovery Day, an annual symposium celebrating undergraduate research.
Reflecting on her time in the department, Pinkard praises the faculty’s unwavering commitment and enthusiasm in aiding students to achieve their academic goals and experiences.
Beyond the academic realm, she has begun working with the Knoxville community, serving as an apprentice at the Muse Knoxville, an award-winning children’s science museum. This role perfectly complements her mission to introduce young minds to the captivating world of STEAM.
“These experiences have made me more passionate about teaching individuals about the career opportunities available in STEAM,” she said.
As she begins her new position at the Muse Knoxville, Pinkard will undoubtedly be an inspiration for young minds exploring the wonders of science.
Aidan Littleton is a junior with a passion for paleontology. Relatedly, he began working with faculty on paleontology projects during his sophomore year and has conducted research in the Stigall and Sumrall labs with plans to continue engaging with additional faculty in the diverse UT paleontology group.
During summer 2023, Littleton was supported by Faculty Research Assistants Funding (FRAF) to conduct research in Department Head Alycia Stigall’s lab. His project focused on comparing the shallow marine community structure before and after the Richmondian Invasion, a dramatic species invasion event in the Late Ordovician that is preserved in the strata around Cincinnati, Ohio, and Nashville.
Though this event is well-studied around Cincinnati, Littleton’s work was the first quantitative comparison of community change across this event in Nashville and represents a critical early step in a larger project in the Stigall Lab. He conducted field, lab, and quantitative analyses for this project, which he presented as a poster at the Annual Geological Society of America Meeting in Pittsburgh this past October.
Littleton is presently working with Associate Professor Colin Sumrall’s group on fossil echinoderm evolution.
“The research which I am currently involved in with Sumrall deals with determining the faunal diversity of ophiuroids (brittle stars) and how their diversity changes across the Carboniferous Period, from the Colony Creek Shale in Texas,” said Littleton. “To do so, the lateral arm plates of brittle stars, which line the exterior of the animal’s limbs, are isolated from samples sourced from multiple stratigraphic layers representing different sections of time. These arm plates are identified to which taxon they belong and counted for abundance. However, quite a few taxa in our dataset are new to science and have yet to be named! For these, we use placeholder names. One such unnamed specimen from Colony Creek shows persistent dominance and has been classified as the ‘smooth modern’ type, while other less common taxa such as Furcaster and Suchaster occur in lower abundances.”
Sara Shields is a third-year PhD student working with Associate Professor Anna Szynkiewicz to study environmental processes controlling the formation of evaporitic salts and microbial activity in dry and nutrient depleted settings on both Earth and Mars.
This past summer, Shields successfully applied for a 2023 scholarship to the International Summer School in Astrobiology held yearly in Santander, Spain. The Josep Comas i Solà International Astrobiology Summer School is co-sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the Centro de Astrobiologia.
This year’s school focused on icy ocean world investigations and provided lectures from international experts, opportunity for peer-to-peer round table discussions, and development of student projects. In addition, the school provided an opportunity for the students to visit the Astroland Interplanetary agency, the Altamira Museum to see and learn about Paleolithic cave art, and to El Soplao caves, which is a site of astrobiological interest.
The Astrobiology Summer School lectures focused on ocean worlds orbiting giant planets in our solar system including Enceladus, Europa, Ganymede, and Titan as key astrobiological targets for future exploration by both NASA and ESA missions.
Lectures were provided by outstanding international experts including Morgan Cable from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Shannon MacKenzie from the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Olga Prieto Ballesteros from El Centro de Astrobiología, and Nicolas Altobelli from the European Space Agency. Overviews of icy ocean world surfaces and future missions from an astrobiological perspective along with reviews of current laboratory and analog field work allowed students to create ideas for collaborative future projects.
Most of Catie Caterham’s friends and family assume that she decided to pursue a graduate degree in geology because of her passion for the subject.
“While that is true, I am certainly not going to argue about the free vacations,” said Caterham. “Carbonate rock, in particular, leads to some of the world’s most beautiful destinations—pink sand beaches, snorkeling—all in the name of science of course!”
This summer she had the privilege of traveling to two idyllic locations: San Salvador Island, Bahamas, and Sardinia, Italy. Caterham’s advisor, Professor Linda Kah, found an opportunity to send their lab group to the Gerace Research Center for a one-week course run by AIPG and the University of Kentucky.
“San Salvador Island is a dream destination for a carbonate sedimentologist,” said Caterham. “The island is surrounded by modern reefs and pink sand beaches while the island interior is comprised of a series of inland lakes, and outcrops of older beach and reef facies. As an avid SCUBA diver, I was quite partial to the daily snorkeling. However, nothing will quite top the experience of observing the modern stromatolites of Storrs Lake with my own eyes—and squishing them with my own feet! The amount of extracellular polymeric substances (microbial mucus) was amazing.”
Her second field trip of the summer was to Iglesias, a mining town in southwestern Sardinia, Italy. This trip was less vacation and more work, as she was there to collect samples from the Cambrian-aged calcimicrobial and archaeocyathid reef complexes to search for herringbone carbonate.
“Herringbone carbonate is an unusual carbonate cement where the c-axis of the crystals rotates during growth,” said Caterham. “This fabric was first identified in Archean rocks and is often thought to be a Precambrian phenomenon. The focus of my thesis is to better understand the origin and neomorphism of the carbonate that comprises herringbone cement and to identify commonalities between samples from different time periods and locations.”
She is thankful to UT to have provided these two field experiences in 2023.
“As a chemistry/environmental science undergrad, I lacked a traditional field-camp experience and was worried that my textbook knowledge would not translate well into the field,” said Caterham. “But with the expert help of Professor Kah, I was able to piece together observations and ideas and began to visualize these ancient environments. I think my experiences encapsulate the true importance of field work. Textbooks and papers can only take you so far, but outcrops never lie.”
PhD student Hannah Rigoni and her advisor, Professor Annette Engel, are working to shed light on cave and aquifer dwelling organisms and their interactions with groundwater geochemistry and microbial communities.
Karst groundwater aquifers provide drinking water to billions of people worldwide, but they are vulnerable to pollution. Aquifers are home to stygobionts—groundwater dwelling fauna—that aid in maintaining water quality by consuming microbial and surface-derived organic matter. Microbial communities in aquifers depend on both surface-derived organic nutrients and inorganic nutrients from water-rock interactions. Despite the global importance of karst aquifers, the relationship between stygobiont communities to groundwater geochemistry and microbial diversity, and their possible utility as water quality indicators, is unknown.
With two highly biodiverse study sites, the Dinaric Karst in Croatia and the Edwards Aquifer in Texas, Rigoni is using geochemical and molecular biological sequencing techniques (including amplicon sequencing, lipidomics, and metagenomics) to characterize groundwater chemistry, microbial community diversity and metabolic processes across these spatially extensive aquifers. These methods provide a foundation to characterize the food-web interactions between stygobionts and microbial communities.
Rigoni has so far uncovered microbial metabolic processes tied to nitrogen, carbon, and methane cycling in both aquifers. In the Dinaric Karst, she has quantified the contribution of microbial biomass produced from ammonia- and methane-oxidizers to stygobiont diets. With as much as 50% of the stygobionts food coming from microbial sources, Rigoni’s research emphasizes the importance of prioritizing water quality maintenance to ensure the survival of endangered stygobionts and the microbial communities on which they rely.
This research makes a scientific case for stygobiont conservation and management of groundwater resources that are an essential resource for many people across the world.
