Dr. Soma Baranwal has been selected as the recipient of the 2015 W. Storrs Cole Memorial Research Award meant to support research in invertebrate micropaleontology. The grant is awarded by Geological Society of America.
Text: Maja Sojtaric
Dr. Soma Baranwal is post doctoral researcher at CAGE.. She is deciphering methane paleorecords in the Arctic by studying fossils of single celled organisms called foraminifera. Dr. Baranwal was recently awarded a grant worth $7400 from Geological Society of America (GSA) for her project “Revisiting Arctic Pleistocene-Holocene (∼2 Ma to present) from ODP 912A: A new record from the Arctic-Atlantic gateway.”
The W. Storrs Cole Memorial Research Award was established to support research in invertebrate micropaleontology. It is given each year to a GSA Member or Fellow between 30 and 65 years of age who has published one or more significant papers on micropaleontology.
Baranwal´s doctoral research focused on understanding high resolution monsoonal variability in the Indian Ocean through biogenic sediments of the Maldives Ridge. After completing her PhD she joined the Department of Palaeoceanography and Palaeoclimate at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS), University of Southampton (UK) as a research assistant in 2008, before joining CAGE partner NGU. Her work there was mainly to construct an updated chronological framework for Quaternary sediments of the Arctic Ocean.
