Karen Sears and Jonathan Marcot
Department of Animal Biology
515 Morrill Hall
505 S. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801

Dr. Karen Sears is an Assistant Professor in the School of Integrative Biology, and a faculty member at the Institute of Genomic Biology of the University of Illinois. She joined the Illinois faculty in 2007, after earning her PhD at the University of Chicago (2003) and performing postdoctoral research in the lab of Dr. Lee Niswander first in New York at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (2003-2005) and then in Colorado at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (2005-2007). In her research, Dr. Sears is broadly interested in the developmental mechanisms that drive morphologic diversification in mammalian limbs. In her investigation of this topic, she combines traditional embryological and paleontological approaches with modern developmental genetic and morphometric techniques to gather data from fossil and living mammals. By combining these disparate types of data, her lab is beginning to unravel the underlying developmental processes responsible for the patterns of morphologic evolution captured by the fossil record. In the lab, Dr. Sears is currently working in several model mammalian systems, including bats, opossums, pigs, and mice.

After growing up in southern California, Jonathan Marcot received two B.S. degrees in Geosciences and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona.  From there, he went to the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology.  There he studied the evolutionary radiations of ruminant artiodactyls with John J. Flynn and Peter J. Wagner, then of the Field Museum of Natural History.  During his work there, he became increasingly interested in phylogenetic methods, and how paleontologists could use these inferences to understand other evolutionary processes.  For his first post-doc at Duke University, he worked with Dan McShea, applying these methods to study large-scale trends in one aspect of biologic complexity.  He went on to a second post-doc at the University of Minnesota with David Fox, where he developed a computer application to perform stratocladistic analysis, StrataPhy. After spending a year as a research assistant to Dena Smith at the University of Colorado, he began work as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).  Here, he is continuing his research into mammalian diversification and the methods we use to study it.

Elisabeth Marcot is nearly 4 years old. She has been a fan of dinosaurs and animals her entire life, and specializes in correcting her grandparents’ pronunciation of dinosaur names. She currently is completing her studies at the Next Generation Early Education, and she plans to attend elementary school next year. Her current studies are focused on discrimination of letters and their sounds, attributing numbers to observed quantities of objects, and the slide on the playground. While undecided about her future career goals, she is narrowing it down to either an animal doctor or something that combines My Little Pony™ with Walking with Dinosaurs. She also enjoys modeling inter- and intraspecific interactions with her plastic dinosaurs (especially which one is the "Mommy" and which one is the baby).