Madeline Ball

Madeline Ball is a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Earth Sciences. Her research integrates vertebrate paleontology, ecomorphology, and computer vision to study small mammal paleoecology, particularly during the Oligocene-Miocene period of the Pacific Northwest.

Education:

• B.Sc. in Evolution and Ecology from The Ohio State University

Her work investigates whether computer vision methods can interpret the diet of extinct small mammal species independently of taxonomy and examines functional shifts in small mammal communities across the Oligo-Miocene in western North America under varying tectonic regimes.

Selected Conferences and Meetings:

• North American Rodents: Landscapes, Ecology, and Evolution (NARLEE) Field Trip; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO (August 2024)
• Paleobiology Database Summer Workshop, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (July 2024)
• NARLEE Workshop on Mammalian diversification; Ann Arbor, MI (June 2024)
• North American Paleontological Convention; Ann Arbor, MI (June 2024) [Poster]
• Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting; Cincinnati, OH (October 2023) [Poster]
• Great Lakes Student PaleoConference; Chicago, IL (October 2022) [Poster]
• Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology Annual Meeting; Phoenix, AZ (January 2021) [Poster]

Madeline is advised by Dr. Samantha Hopkins and was previously supervised by Dr. Jonathan Calede at The Ohio State University. She joined the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab in August 2024 after graduating from OSU in December 2023.