Workshops
Create impact for your science ideas
with a PaleoSynthesis Workshop
- Interdisciplinary workshops are among the best measures to develop a scientific theme.
- We offer fully funded (i.e., travel & accommodation, DA) workshops for up to 14 peers across the globe.
- We provide scientific support to workshop participants, facilitated by Postdoc Danijela Dimitrijevic. Get in touch with her!
- If you have an idea for a paleontology workshop, please apply.
Application is open – deadline December 15! 👉 Application information
Current workshops
BITE – Biotic Interactions in Deep Time
“Biotic interaction plays an important role in the evolution of groups through time”
Aleksandra Skawina (University of Warsaw, Poland) and Devapriya Chattopadhyay (IISER, Pune, India); fully funded
“Human-made climate change is not confined by national borders. The open ocean, which, for the most part, lies beyond national jurisdiction, is just as severely impacted by climate change as are nationally regulated coastal waters.”
Wolfgang Kiessling (FAU) with the AGELESS consortium
DeepIL – Deep-Time Impacts of Life on Earth System
“Most paleontological and ecological work revolves around the impact of the abiotic Earth system on life, but how about the other way round? How does life influence Earth?“
Wolfgang Kiessling, Danijela Dimitrijevic, Barbara Seuss (PaleoSynthesis Team)
FDTP – Fossil, Dates and Tectonic Plates
“The Cambrian Explosion coincides with the amalgamation of Gondwana… explore evolutionary dynamics during the rise of complex animal life“
Marissa Betts (University of New England, Australia) and Sabin Zahirovic (University of Sydney, Australia); partly funded
IRAL – Integrated Record of Ancient Life
Big Data framework for the next generation of data infrastructure in paleontological research……”Compilations of fossil data are fundamental to modern paleontology”
Emma Dunne* and Adam Kocsis, FAU, fully funded; *ED applied while in Birmingham
IRATE – International Research workshop for the Advancement of Taphonomic Experiments
“All organic materials are subjected to postmortem taphonomic processes prior to fossilisation, and therefore taphonomy is the foundation of all palaeobiological research.“
Orla Bath-Enright (SMNS, Stuttgart) and Thomas Clements (FAU, Erlangen); fully funded
MURKY – Mesophotic and turbid Reefs as Key ecosystems for the future?
“Coral reefs are the most biodiverse marine ecosystem on Earth today … threatened by human activities and associated climate change.”
Nadia Santodomingo (University of Oxford, UK) and Lewis A. Jones (Universidade de Vigo, Spain); fully funded
PRIME – Prediction and Identification of Mass Extinctions
“Extinctions are a fundamental part of evolution…we are at the beginning of a contemporary mass extinction event.“
Baran Karapunar (Leeds, UK) and Bethany Allen (Zurich & Potsdam); fully funded
TRIBE – Trilobite Biogeography and Ecology
“The geographic distribution of animals impacts a range of macroevolutionary trends”
Harriet B. Drage (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and Stephen Pates, (University of Cambridge, UK); fully funded
Past Workshops
“In a rapidly changing world, there is an urgent need to understand how communities respond to environmental perturbations of varying magnitudes and rates.”
Pincelli Hull (Yale, USA), Marina Costa Rillo (Univ. Oldenburg), Seth Finnegan (UC Berkeley, USA); fully funded
DDCP – Diversity Dynamics and Crisis in Paleontology
The workshop is based on the idea that Palaeontology is unique among scientific disciplines in that it thrives on the exchange of information across diverse communities, both academic and non-academic.
Nussaibah Raja-Schoob (FAU, Germany) and Emma Dunne (Univ. Birmingham, UK; now FAU); funding support
“Our proposed working group will advance core goals of conservation paleobiology … Paleontological research will be critical to understand the extent and drivers of eco-logical novelty, placing modern patterns in a deep-time context.”
Tim Staples and John Pandolfi, University of Queensland; implemented into PaleoSynthesis
Big Questions
Monitored by previous post doc Jansen A. Smith – continued by Elizabeth Dowding
PaleoG – Big Questions Germany
“…geological sciences including paleontology, have been barely visible in ESS … (but) Paleontology with its strong ties to both, life- and geosciences, is thus a key science in ESS“
Alexander Nützel (LMU, BSPG), Vanessa Roden (NAWAREUM), Hans Kerp (Univ. Münster), Bettina Reichenbacher (LMU, BSPG)