The Peder Sather Grant is awarded for their proposal "Dissecting the timing, ecological signature, and environmental context of the largest biodiversification in Earth history."
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) is one of the most dramatic episodes of sustained biodiversification in Earth history. To understand what drove the GOBE, hence constraining the evolutionary paths that led to the flora and fauna we live among today, Liow and Finnegan propose to use a combination of statistical modeling, previously collected data and data to be generated in new field expeditions, to investigate the relationship between macroevolutionary dynamics, and changes in environmental conditions, ecological structure, and fossil preservation.
The Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study supports "projects carried out by researchers at UC Berkeley in collaboration with researchers from nine Norwegian universities. The Center offers grants of between $10K and $25K. Funds are made available for one academic year. Grants can support activities such as workshops, mini-conferences, virtual intellectual exchanges, the undertaking of exploratory and pilot studies, activities such as PhD student exchanges, longer-term stays for Principal Investigators, the collection and analysis of data, and other core research activities."
The work is carried out as part of the LINK project (Phanerozoic diversification: linking observation and process) led by Lee Hsiang Liow. We congratulate Liow and Finnegan with the grant!