I am immensely proud of this team and happy to have been a part of it. I am even more honored that they trusted me enough to lead a small charge on some of these ideas 🥹

For those of you that find this interesting and not totally esoteric... reach out! I would love to chat ☺️

On a personal note, this paper has been a source of scientific growth and absolute joy to work on. We started working on this when I was still in graduate school, just barely out of my qualifying exams, and it has been a huge source of inspiration for my work since we started.

abundance, and last on geologic timescales. In the paper, we provide a number of case studies of our favorite examples, but we aren't all encompassing. There are a ton of Earth system engineers out there for us to study. 🦠🌱🌆🌍

So, here we present a new term and framework: Earth system engineers. This describes organisms that do fall under the umbrella of ecosystem engineers, but have completely outsized impacts on their environments. Their influences are geographically widespread, often surprisingly decoupled from

and anthropologist (no small feat!) we realized we needed something... new. Something to reflect the profound, permanent, step-change impacts on the planet that we observe from some ecosystem engineers in the rock record – and, of course, that we can directly watch among humans today.

Over the last four years, this team has been getting together to talk about ecosystem engineers on the ancient, present, and future Earth. Early on in our discussions to agree on a definition of ecosystem engineering that fit this group of palaeontologists, ecologists, geochemists,

The bottom line: zoogeochemical niche construction offers a way to understand how animals, through their elemental legacies, can influence not just ecosystems—but their own evolutionary trajectories.

🤩🤩🤩🤩 Absolutely cannot wait to read this!!

This is also totally inconsistent with action on EDI issues. The more that funding for ECRs is an inconsistent boom and bust, the more it harms those without the opportunities and external resources to ride out the droughts. Lots of my peers are less fortunate than me in this regard.

The early career researchers who apply for fellowships like these are usually working on fixed term contracts without much job security. We need consistent, plannable fellowship opportunities, not mixed messages wasting our time. It shouldn't be a big ask.

Ah congratulations!!!! 🤩

To be clear, as STEM educators, this is so much deeper than recruiting a diverse workforce. Having ample resources to combat this gap is key to gender equality. This, the viral “girl math” trend, trad wife and manosphere content, and financial coercion are all tightly linked