Meghan Balk

Meghan Balk is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Evolution and Paleobiology Group at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo. Her work combines museum collections and trait databases to investigate how inter- and intra-specific traits change across time and space. She is passionate about digitizing museum data and enabling FAIR data principles for continued exploration of data-driven science across evolutionary biology and ecology.

Balk received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 2017 with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Science through the Department of Biology. She earned her B.S. from the University of California, Davis in 2010 in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, & Biodiversity, with a minor in Paleobiology through the Department of Geology. Her academic journey reflects a strong foundation in both biological sciences and geological perspectives on evolutionary processes.

Her research employs both micro- and macroscopic approaches to understand abiotic and biotic drivers of phenotypic evolution. She investigates within and among lineage phenotypic evolution using fossil and modern records of organisms like bryozoans. Her work on abiotic drivers examines body size changes in species like the bushy-tailed woodrat across geological time, while her research on biotic drivers explores predator-prey relationships in the fossil record, particularly focusing on species like Otodus megalodon. She utilizes machine learning and computational approaches to extract morphological trait data from specimen images.

Balk's publication record demonstrates expertise across evolutionary biology, paleontology, ecology, and computational approaches. Her recent work focuses on developing FAIR and modular workflows for image-based knowledge discovery in the emerging field of imageomics. She has made significant contributions to understanding body size evolution across geological time, predator-prey relationships in the fossil record, and promoting open science principles for trait-based research. Her work bridges traditional paleontological methods with cutting-edge computational techniques.

Balk is actively involved in several research projects including ROCKS PARADOX (Dissecting the paradox of stasis in evolutionary biology) and Machine-readable Nature (MaNa). She collaborates with researchers across institutions to create ontologies and workflows for trait data, such as the Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies (FuTRES) project and the Biology-Guided Neural Networks project. She teaches courses including Foundational Open Science Skills workshop, Git for Mere Mortals webinar, and R Basics Crash course, emphasizing the importance of reproducible research practices.