Congratulations to Dr. Elena Robakiewicz who successfully defended her dissertation “Environment and Lake Systems Across Africa: Understanding the Relationship between Environments, Lakes, and Hominins” this summer! Elena is the first student at UConn and the department to complete a dual degree with her Cotutelle between UConn and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. She begins a Teaching and Research Fellowship in Tübingen starting in the fall where she will be teaching courses on paleoenvironmental proxies. Congratulations again to Elena and we are excited to see what comes next!

As part of the Trends, Rhythms and Events in Earth Climate System 2021 Summer School hosted by the University of Potsdam and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Elena explored how climate change is visible in our own quiet corner.

After needing to cancel last year’s annual GeoSymposium due to the pandemic, our team contributed greatly to this year’s virtual GeoSymposium. Along with other members of UConn’s Geosciences Graduate Group, Elena helped create and organize the poster session and awards ceremony hosted over GatherTown and the oral presentation session hosted over Zoom Webinar. In addition, she presented her work in East Africa with a poster titled “Middle-Pleistocene Revolution Climate at Paleolake Suguta, Kenya”. Jim presented his dissertation research over Zoom with his project titled “Preservation, host preference, and possible environmental limitations of late Frasnian (Late Devonian) skeletobionts in the Appalachian Foreland Basin, USA”. Congratulations to Jim and Elena for a job well done and to all other UConn Geoscience graduates and undergraduates who presented virtually this year!

Congratulations to Elena Robakiewicz who has been accepted into the Potsdam 2021 summer school course “Trends, Rhythms and Events in the Earth’s Climate System – Past, Present and Future”. This online summer school will teach statistical techniques for climate data using MatLab and Python. She is one of 72 PhD students from across the globe who was accepted! We are excited to hear more about what you learn!