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Spring Lecture Series: From Diatoms to DNA
March 19 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free
Join us for our 2025 Spring Lecture Series presented by Larry & Karen Bettcher. Offered as a hybrid event, participants can choose when registering to take part in-person at the museum or online via Zoom.
Discover how lake mud holds clues to the past as Dr. Trisha Spanbauer explores how fossils and DNA in sediment reveal the history of lakes and how they’ve changed over time.
From Diatoms to DNA: Using the Information Contained in Mud to Understand the History of Lakes
Lakes hold a hidden history beneath their surfaces, preserved in layers of sediment that accumulate over time. In this lecture, Dr. Trisha Spanbauer will explore how interdisciplinary research is uncovering the ecological and evolutionary changes that have shaped aquatic ecosystems. By analyzing fossil and DNA records from ancient lakes in South America and Africa, as well as younger lakes in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, Dr. Spanbauer and her team reveal how environmental disturbances have influenced lake ecosystems over time.
Register to attend virtually HERE.
About the Speaker
Dr. Trisha Spanbauer joined the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Toledo in 2019, and she is currently a resident faculty member at the Lake Erie Center. Prior to becoming a professor, Dr. Spanbauer received a BFA in Visual Art and Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Ph.D. in Geology and Biology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Research in her lab is broadly interested in ecological and evolutionary change over a broad range of timescales, with a specialization in using fossils and genetic material from sediment archives to understand global environmental change.
