biology

Lauren Sallan

Lauren Sallan is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Lauren Sallan rather than just read about it. In short: Lauren Sallan is an American academic who is the head of the Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and was previously the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a paleobiologist who uses big data analytics to study macroevolution.

Key takeaways

Lauren Sallan belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lauren Sallan to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lauren Sallan from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lauren Sallan is an American academic who is the head of the Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and was previously the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a paleobiologist who uses big data analytics to study macroevolution. She is a TED Senior Fellow and has two TED talks with almost three million views as of 2022.

Early life and education Sallan was born in Chicago. She studied biology at Florida Atlantic University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science, cum laude, in 2003, and a Master of Science in biology in 2007 She then earned a Master of Science in organismal biology and a PhD in integrative biology from the University of Chicago.

Career

Research Sallan worked on End-Devonian extinction; a critical stage in the evolution of vertebrates. She found that the Hangenberg event was immensely important for modern biodiversity and a bottleneck in the evolutionary history of vertebrates. During her PhD, she studied the fossils of fish that diversified around the time of an extinction event, finding the head features diversified before body shapes. The work was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Motherboard. After completing her PhD, Sallan joined the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan She studied the early evolution of ray-finned fishes, including an early form with a tetrapod-like spine.

Sallan uses big data analytics to study macroevolution, with a particular focus on palaeoichthyology. She uses data mining to identify why some species of fish persist whilst others die off. She joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. She leads a large research lab, which includes undergraduate and graduate students. In 2015, she developed a dataset of fish fossils with then undergraduate student Andrew Galimberti. Their analysis showed that during the Devonian period vertebrates gradually increased in size, obeying Cope's rule. She has continued to study the Hangenberg event, finding small-bodied species with rapid reproduction dominate post-extinction communities. She investigated the fossils of the Aetheretmon and found how ray-finned fishes got their tail fins, which are distinct from the tails of land animals. The fossils were recovered from Scotland, and included some of the smallest (3 cm long) and least studied species. Sallan compiled a comprehensive database of 3,000 fish fossils found between 360 and 480 million years ago. By investigating these fossils, Sallan found that the earliest vertebrate fossils were found near the shore, perhaps due to stronger skeletons due to crashing waves. She studied 31,526 fish species and found the fastest species formation rates occurred in the coldest oceans. Cold water fish form new species at twice the rate of tropical fish. She was named the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. The position is for an "outstanding faculty member whose pursuits exemplify the integration of knowledge".

Public engagement Sallan was one of fifteen people to be selected as a TED fellow in 2017. In April 2017 she delivered a talk entitled "How to win at evolution and survive a mass extinction". She developed a TEDed class on why fish were fish shaped, and why they didn't swim upside down. She was featured in the popular science book The Ends of the World, written by Peter Brannen. In 2018 Sallan was awarded the University of Chicago Medical and Biological Sciences Distinguished Service Award. In 2019, Sallan was named as one of 10 TED Senior Fellows. She gave a second TED Talk, "A brief tour of the last 4 billion years (dinosaurs not included)" at TEDSummit 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland

Awards and honors 2009 Palaeontological Association Sylvester-Bradley Award 2009 American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists Raney Award 2015 International Symposium on Early Vertebrates/Lower Vertebrates Stensiö Award 2017 TED Fellow 2018 University of Chicago Distinguished Service Award for Early Achievement 2019 NSF Award 2019 TED Senior Fellow

References

External links

Official website Lauren Sallan publications indexed by Google Scholar

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lauren Sallan

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lauren Sallan claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lauren Sallan before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lauren Sallan ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lauren Sallan

In research: Lauren Sallan appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lauren Sallan in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lauren Sallan is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century American biologists, 21st-century American women biologists, American evolutionary biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lauren Sallan outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Lauren Sallan in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lauren Sallan means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lauren Sallan out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lauren Sallan in simple terms?

Why does Lauren Sallan matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lauren Sallan?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lauren Sallan.