Dr. Felisa Smith, University of New Mexico
The influence of hominins on mammal biodiversity and body size over the late Quaternary

Professor Felisa Smith grew up in Laguna Beach in sunny southern California, where she was distinctive for being the only one in class when the surf was up.  From this nerdy and not so auspicious beginning, she went on to earn her bachelors degree in Biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1980.  A short stint of teaching high school science and math to overactive teenagers convinced her that this traditional career path was not for her.  Accordingly, she went on to graduate school earning a PhD from the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine in 1992. Dr. Smith was a NSF Postdoctoral fellow with Jim Brown and is now a full professor at the University of New Mexico.  Over her career she has worked on organisms from microbes to mammoth, but vastly prefers the latter. Along the way, she developed an interest in body size and conservation paleoecology. She has conducted field studies examining rodent life history and physiological tradeoffs in one of the most stressful environments on Earth (Death Valley), paleoecological studies of the response of rodents to climate change over the late Quaternary using packrat middens, and database driven analysis of the large-scale macroevolutionary patterns of mammalian body size across the Cenozoic. These days she mostly thinks about the consequences of the terminal Pleistocene megafauna extinction on surviving mammals in North America.