Celebrating our Summer Undergraduate Students

The Paleo-FISHES Lab’s inaugural summer included two fantastic summer undergraduate interns, joining the lab through different summer internship programs. Arleth Martinez, a biology student from Berea College, and Elizabeth Pellegrini, a marine sciences student at Eckerd College joined the lab and became the first people to successfully process samples and complete projects in our new lab space.

Arleth focused her efforts on exploring the morphology of extant Squaliformes (a clade of deep sea sharks) denticles, generating over 500 GB of images, and finding some incredible morphological diversity on this unique group of sharks.

Elizabeth processed dozens of sediment samples and found hundreds of microfossils going back ~50-55 million years, to explore how sharks responded to the extreme global warmth of the Early Eocene. In addition to her interesting scientific findings, led the design of the Paleo-FISHES Lab Logo!

Both Arleth and Elizabeth presented their work at our inter-institutional end-of-summer Denticle Multiverse meeting (held jointly at Harvard and WHOI this year on July 31-August 1), and presented posters at the WHOI Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium during their last week (August 8). In addition, Arleth presented her research at the end-of-summer PEP Symposium on August 9! We are so incredibly proud of the work you both put in this summer, and can’t wait to see where your next adventures take you!

p.s. If you want to see some adventures from the Denticle Multiverse meeting, Arleth documented the meeting on the Woods Hole PEP Instagram Page – check it out here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17936863286771462/