Kjellmark, K., Park Boush, L., Myrbo, A., Berman, M.J., Gnivecki, P., 2023. Paleoecological history of Eleuthera Island, The Bahamas based on pollen and charcoal analysis from two lakes. Journal of Paleolimnology 71:85-99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-023-00303-x
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Welcome to our New Lab Members!
The Park Boush Lab is pleased to welcome Julia Bradshaw and Zachary Clore to the lab! Julia will be pursuing a PhD, working on a project on Lake Tanganyika, Africa and Zach will be doing a MS project on blue holes in the Bahamas. We are really excited to have them join us!
We are recruiting new graduate students!
NSF Funded Graduate Degree Opportunity in Paleobiology
Park Boush Lab
Support for either a MS or PhD to work on NSF funded project—”Collaborative Research: BoCP-Implementation: The impact of climate change on functional biodiversity across spatiotemporal scales at Lake Tanganyika, Africa.“
This project involves testing hypotheses of food web response to climate change using ostracodes as proxies for depth and oxygenation. If you are interested in biodiversity and climate change, this might interest you.
Check out our graduate program in the Earth Science Department at UConn (https://earthsciences.uconn.edu)
Applications currently being accepted until January 1, 2024. 
Contact Dr. Lisa Park Boush (lisa.park_boush@uconn.edu) for further information.
Congratulations to Dr. Elena Robakiewicz!
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!
Lake Tanganyika NSF Biodiversity Grant Awarded to Lisa Park Boush
As part of a multi-university team, Park Boush is the recent recipient of nearly $2.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project that will track ancient oxygen levels and life within Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa, illuminating how its biodiversity adapted to past climate change. With this knowledge, the team will be able to predict the effects of human-caused climate change on the ecosystem of the lake, on which millions of people depend as a food supply.
Seeing Climate Change All Around Us
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.
Elena used temperature data from Storrs, CT to understand how temperatures have changed since 1888. She found that while overall temperatures are rising, minimum temperatures are disproportionately increasing compared to maximum temperatures. This change has a direct impact on how often local lakes freeze over in the winter. Check out the rest of her findings here!
Congratulations to our Team Members who contributed to UConn GeoSymposium!
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!
New book on Limnogeology just published!
Our new book “Limnogeology: Progress, Challenges and Opportunities: A Tribute to Elizabeth Gierlowski-Kordesch,” is published!
Our new paper, “Ecological Response of Ostracodes (Arthropoda, Crustacea) to Lake-Level Fluctuations in the Eocene Green River Formation, Fossil Basin, Wyoming, USA” is published as one of the chapters
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66576-0_7
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66576-0
Congratulations, Elena!
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!
Congratulations Elena Robakiewicz
Congratulations to Elena Robakiewicz for receiving an Explorer’s Grant from The Explorers Club for her Graduate Research in Angola.