Olivia DrakeNicole Arulanantham, who is entering her second year as a graduate student in the Astronomy MA program, was awarded a Chambliss Medal by the American Astronomical Society at its June 3 meeting in Boston. The awards are given to recognize exemplary research by a student presenting a poster paper at an AAS meeting. Arulanantham worked on the study with her advisor, Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, chair of the Astronomy Department, and Ann Marie Cody of the California Institute of Technology. It involved analysis of data obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Read more about the…
Ellen Thomas, research professor of earth and environmental sciences, is the author of a paper titled "Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," published in Paleoceanography, May 2014. In this paper Thomas and her colleagues document that ocean acidification of the surface ocean not only occurred during past times of global warming and high CO2 levels, but also by how much — about 0.3 pH units. The group studied planktic foraminifers from a drill site in the North Pacific. Thomas' study has been highlighted in a press release from Columbia University and also on Phys.org.