Dr. Rachel Short

Dr. Short is a faculty member at South Dakota State University. She was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and PhD student in the Lawing Lab. She studies functional aspects of form in postcranial skeletal material in ungulates and other mammalian taxa. She is interested in developing an ecometric to help reconstruct ancient climates and the most likely vegetation cover given the distribution of ungulate ankle bone morphology at a fossil site. As a postdoc, she was jointly mentored by me and Dr. Jenny McGuire, the lead of SEPL people at Georgia Tech. She is an important collaborator on our NSF grant, “Vertebrate Functional Traits as Indicators of Ecosystem Function in Deep and Shallow Time” and is a pivotal component of the team working on NSF grant, “Informal science learning at biological field stations.” For more on Rachel’s recent work, see her page here (https://rashort.weebly.com/).