Wissenschaftliche Interessen:

Bethany [she/her] is a computational evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist. Her research focuses on understanding differences in biodiversity across large temporal and spatial scales. She is currently working on projects focusing on how landscape, climate, and biodiversity change are coupled in desert environments, and how best to infer changes in biodiversity through deep time, particularly working with data from the fossil record.

Bethany is an advocate for open, reproducible science and has worked on several computational tools and projects to this end, including the R packages palaeoverse, rmacrostrat and DeepDiveR.

She has recently discussed her research through

• PalaeoPERCS seminar, September 2025, accessible via their YouTube channel (How can we quantify biodiversity in deep time?)
• Interview with France24, July 2025, read the article here (No tropical forest, no life? The mystery that lasted five million years, in French)
• Cambridge Prisms 'Real World Challenges' seminar, June 2025, accessible via their website (Were dinosaurs doomed to extinction? New insights from phylodynamic models)

Karriere:

2025 -          Postdoctoral Researcher in Earth Surface Process Modelling, GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Germany

2021 - 2024 Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Evolution at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

2017 - 2021 PhD Student in Computational Palaeobiology at the University of Leeds, UK

Werdegang / Ausbildung:

2016 - 2017 MSc Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol, UK

2012 - 2015 BSc Natural Sciences (Biology and Earth Sciences) at Durham University, UK

Projekte:

DFG CRC 1211 (Earth Evolution at the Dry Limit) Project C7 (Modeling the co-evolution of life and landform)

Paleosynthesis Grant PRIME (PRediction and Identification of Mass Extinctions)

Wissenschaftliche Gremien:

Co-Chair of the Macroecology Special Interest Group of the British Ecological Society

Member of the Paleobiology Database Executive Committee

Developer at Palaeoverse

Editor at Palaeontology