During fall break, Associate Professor of Geosciences Catherine (Cat) Beck hosted the annual “all hands meeting” of researchers on the Turkana Miocene Project. The project, an ongoing study on seasonal rainfall variability in East Africa over the last 200,000 years, was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Frontier Research in Earth Sciences (FRES) grant in 2021.
More than 20 researchers from institutions including Stony Brook, Rutgers, Salem State, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Memphis attended in person at the Taylor Science Center. Additional participants – both international and domestic – joined the meeting on Zoom. Adeera Batlay ’25 also worked on the project and attended parts of the meeting stemming from her involvement in the field in 2023 and running samples.
Beck said the meeting was mostly a working session but also included several reports and highlights from graduate students’ and faculty members’ individual research groups.
