{"id":336,"date":"2021-10-20T04:31:11","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T11:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/?p=336"},"modified":"2022-10-03T11:53:28","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T18:53:28","slug":"congratulations-to-megan-whitney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/2021\/10\/20\/congratulations-to-megan-whitney\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations to Megan Whitney!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Megan Whitney successfully defended her dissertation on Friday, Dec. 6th. Megan&#8217;s research uses paleohisology\u2014the study of ancient tissue microstructure (e.g., bones, teeth)\u2014to understand the evolutionary origins of mammal-like dental traits. Specifically, she looked at how and when certain mammal-like dental features (e.g., having a soft tissue attaching teeth to the jaw) arose in ancient mammalian ancestors (i.e., non-mammalian synapsids), in order to determine what selective pressures may have driven the evolution of certain traits. Megan found that, in general, mammal-like dental traits were acquired in a stepwise fashion, with more deeply nested clades exhibiting more mammal-like, and less reptile-like, dentitions; however, certain traits have evolved convergently in distantly related groups, and this widespread parallelism is probably related to similar dietary adaptations (e.g., herbivory). Megan will begin a postdoctoral research position at Harvard University in January, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" src=\"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DrWhit.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-469\" srcset=\"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DrWhit.jpg 320w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DrWhit-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Megan Whitney successfully defended her dissertation on Friday, Dec. 6th. Megan&#8217;s research uses paleohisology\u2014the study<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":470,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[22],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recent-graduates"],"authors":[{"term_id":22,"user_id":1,"is_guest":0,"slug":"scipos","display_name":"SciPos","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/0bb1f4cb5ff99dd034602ced0e2534fc.png","url2x":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/0bb1f4cb5ff99dd034602ced0e2534fc.png"},"author_category":"","user_url":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}