Jacquelyn Gill

I'm an ice age ecologist, using the fossil record to help us understand how climate change and extinction will affect ecological communities. I lead the BEAST Lab (Biodiversity and Environment Across Space and Time) at the University of Maine, where we play in the mud, coax stories out of ancient poop and plants, and learn about past ecosystems. I'm also passionate about science communication and diversity in STEM. Growing up as the child of parents in the Navy, I moved around a lot, which instilled in me a fascination for the natural world and geography. It was in New England that I really started thinking about history, from abandoned stone walls to Native stories about the land, to the ice age history written in stone and preserved in peat bogs. After graduating from College of the Atlantic, I went to Wisconsin to pursue my graduate work on the consequences of the extinction of ice age animals like mammoths and mastodons. It's there that I started blogging and tweeting about science as ways to make science more accessible. I started a faculty position at the University of Maine in 2013, where I'm excited to work with the next generation of scientists and science-savvy citizen.

February 2014