Amy Atwater at work.Amy Atwater began her love affair with paleontology when she was 9 years old and started attending summer science camps in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon. She studied geology and paleontology at the University of Oregon while also working seasonally at Arches National Park in southeast Utah. She received her B.S. in Geological Sciences in 2013 and then went on to complete a GeoCorps internship at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska where she studied the newly discovered dinosaur tracks in the late Cretaceous Cantwell Formation.

Amy is a writer for the Huffington Post’s Girls in STEM blog as well as the co-founder of Mary Annings Revenge, a blog about being women paleontologists. She is passionate about community outreach and encouraging more women to pursue the sciences. Amy’s research interests are mainly focused on extinct mammalian taxa and the effects of climate change on entire ecosystems during the Cenozoic. Her favorite organism and the study subject of her Honors College senior thesis are omomyids, a kind of extinct primate that thrived in North America during the Eocene. She was a 2012 National Goldwater Scholar and she is looking forward to pursuing her doctorate in vertebrate paleontology in the upcoming years.