Madeline Ball

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, advised by Dr. Samantha Hopkins. My research focuses on small mammal paleoecology, particularly during the Oligocene-Miocene of the Pacific Northwest.

I recieved my B.Sc. in Evolution and Ecology from The Ohio State University and completed an undergraduate thesis on the evolution and ecology of bite force in geomorph rodents under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Calede.

Research Interests

• Methods in paleoecology: Developing computer vision methods, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to classify dietary ecologies in modern and fossil small mammals, with the goal of advancing 2D approaches to enable large-scale analyses and make paleoecological research more accessible.
• Community paleoecology: Investigating functional shifts in small mammal communities of Oregon across the Oligo-Miocene, a time marked by significant tectonic activity and climatic transitions. I aim to examine how changing landscapes and climates influenced ecological roles, with the goal of linking fossil data to larger-scale evolutionary and environmental processes.
• Drivers of diversity: Exploring the mechanisms that shaped small mammal diversity through deep time. This includes evaluating the relative roles of immigration, taxonomic turnover, and endemic speciation, as well as how these processes interacted with tectonic and climatic change to generate the diversity patterns preserved in the fossil record.
• Dark data: Utilizing unpublished or under-catalogued fossil specimens housed in museum collections to expand available datasets. These “dark data” provide critical insights into species occurrences, ecological traits, and community structure that are often absent from published databases.

Conferences and Meetings

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