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Dear Geographers,
Next week we will have our third visitor in the "Women, Ecology, and Conservation in a Changing World" seminar series sponsored by the Haines-Morris Fund, our department, the department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology, and Phi Beta Kappa.
Our visitor, Dr. Kendra McLauchlan, is a geographer at Kansas State University. There she teaches courses in physical geography and biogeography and directs the The Paleoenvironmental Laboratory. As described on her lab web site (https://sites.google.com/site/paleoenvironmentksu/home), the work she and her students and collaborators pursue is directed at understanding the functioning and characteristics of ecosystems in the past. The research can be organized into three modules: 1) reconstructing material flows through terrestrial ecosystems, particularly nutrients, 2) reconstructing vegetation and fire history in grassland ecosystems, and 3) determining the magnitude and reversibility of human impacts on ecosystems. Most of the research involves field work supported by laboratory techniques. Her group studies lacustrine sediment stratigraphy and chronology, and several proxy records including pollen, charcoal, elemental concentrations, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes. They also have expertise in dendrochronology and modern terrestrial ecosystem ecology. They use landscape models, remote sensing data, and GIS techniques, as well.
Dr.
McLauchlan will give our colloquium talk
on Thursday, February 23, 3:40-5:00 in the Hodges Library
Auditorium. We chose this venue to have room to invite the campus community. Please attend and please invite students
in your classes to attend. The title of her presentation is, "Reconstructing
Nitrogen Cycling in the Paleorecord to Assess Current Global Changes."
On
Friday, February
24, from 12:30-1:30, Dr. McLauchlan will
lead an informal, career-related discussion
that will serve as our Lillian Stimson event for this year.
You can read more about
Lillian Stimson, one of the first female
professors in Geography at UT, here:
geography.utk.edu/Who%20was%20Lillian%20Stimson.pdf.
This informal discussion will
follow two similar discussions with our first two visitors in the
seminar series, and has the title, "Perspectives
on a ‘Changing
Climate’ toward
Women in
Environmental
Science."
This event will be held in 201 Burchfiel (not 407 Burchfiel as
on the poster), and all interested faculty and
students in Geography and Ecology are invited to attend. TWIG
(Tennessee Women in Geography) are
arranging some very nice refreshments.
Be sure to
put this on your calendar!
(This event is not just for women!)
I
am developing a schedule for
Dr. McLauchlan's visit in coordination with our hosts in Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology.
Rather than putting a sign up sheet in the workroom
I'd like to ask you to get back to me with your interest in meeting with our visitor. Please
let me know if you would like to schedule a meeting with her, or if you would
like to be part of a small group that takes her to lunch on
Thursday or Friday.
The Friday lunch will be from 11:30-12:15 at the
Student Union across the street from BGB (just prior to the Lillian Stimson event).
The Thursday lunch could be on campus or possibly off campus.
The lunch groups might include Ecology faculty
or students also.
Your lunch will be covered by our seminar
funds.
Right
now, I am planning to take Kendra to the airport on Friday early evening, but if someone else wanted to do that combined with an early dinner out that would be another option for interacting with our visitor. If you are interested let me know.
I'd
like to have someone give her a tour of Burchfiel, and
show her our GIS labs and tell her about activity
in that area. Henri, I am sure she would
also like to see your lab.
Michael, would
you like to schedule a special undergraduate meeting with our visitor?
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Sally