Student Summer Internships at the Yale Peabody Museum

Research Project: Paleobotany

Mentor: Leo J. Hickey
Professor, Yale Department of Geology & Geophysics; Curator of Paleobotany, Yale Peabody Museum
leo.hickey@yale.edu | Website
Division of Paleobotany Website

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Research Interests: Plant phylogeny, evolution and paleoecology of the flowering plants, paleoclimate, and stratigraphy.

My research centers on reconstructing the evolutionary history of the flowering plants through the coordinated investigation of their comparative morphology and their fossil record. Besides my interest in the sequence of change in flowering plant relationships and their characteristics, I also seek to elucidate the ecological-adaptive factors that have operated to produce the vegetation of today. Much of this effort has involved the development of rigorous methods of identifying the leaves of flowering plants because, even though fossil leaf impressions are the most abundant of megafossil plant remains, they have been extensively misidentified. An especially important part of my research has been the recognition and description of leaf architectural features having systematic significance and a survey of their distribution in over 450 families of living flowering plants.

To Apply

Interested? Send a one- to two-page project description, along with a letter of support from the mentor of this research project, to the internship program coordinator:

Eric Lazo-Wasem
Senior Collections Manager
Division of Invertebrate Zoology
Peabody Museum of Natural History
Yale University
P.O. Box 208118
New Haven, CT 06520-8118 USA

203.432.3784
Fax 203.432.9816
eric.lazo-wasem@yale.edu


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