Northrop Distinguished Lecture

Weekly Colloquium - Fall 2026

Oct 23, 2026 - 02:00pm

Speaker: Dr. Mary Droser, University of California Riverside

We are excited to announce that Dr. Mary Droser will be joining the UNM community on October 23rd to deliver our annual Northrop Distinguished Lecture.

Dr. Mary Droser is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is in the area of evolutionary paleoecology, examining large-scale interactions between life and environments. She was born in New York, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester in Geology. She obtained her M.S. from SUNY Binghamton and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside in 1989. She was a recipient of the SEPM Moore Medal (2020), the University of California, Riverside Dissertation Advisor Award (2020), the Walcott Medal from National Academy of Sciences (2022) and the Paleontological Society Medal (2024). In 2025, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Much of her work in the last 20 years has focused on the Ediacaran of South Australia where her team has excavated over 40 fossiliferous beds that reveal in situ communities of the Ediacara Biota. Using this extraordinary fossil record, they have described a significant number of new taxa with wildly varying body plans. With students, Droser has documented the earliest sexual reproduction in animals, the advent of motility, the oldest evidence of scavenging and the advent of multicellular life in the water column. Recently, she has worked with the South Australian government to establish a new National Park based on the Ediacaran fossil record of South Australia.

Please join us and learn about the evolution of Earth's earliest known complex multicellular organisms!