Event Details
"Breathing Life into Dinosaurs" A reception with Professor Curry Rogers will follow the lecture. The lecture will be offered as a hybrid event and recorded for later viewing. If you plan to attend in person, please register by following the link below by Sunday, March 24. If you wish to join remotely through Zoom, please register by following the link below. Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Biology and Geology at Macalester, where she has been a member of the tenure-track faculty since 2008. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Montana State University (1996), and her master’s degree (1999) and PhD (2001) in anatomical sciences from Stony Brook University. In addition to her appointment at Macalester, she is also an advising member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota, and holds research associate positions at the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Museum of the Rockies, and at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Teaching and mentoring are central themes of her work at Macalester. She has taught, on average, more than 150 students per year in courses like Dinosaurs, Origins, Biodiversity and Evolution, and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy. Curry Rogers has taught six first-year courses, and has especially valued her role as an academic advisor to these students and many more. Recognized for these efforts, she was honored to receive the Jack and Marty Rossmann Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015. Curry Rogers is also actively involved in public outreach and education, and is well-known for her skills as a science communicator. In addition to sharing her work on sauropod paleobiology (2012) and tiny fossils from Montana (2024) in the popular science magazine Scientific American, she has been featured in many television and film productions, including the IMAX film Titanosaur 3D, and on PBS, BBC Horizon, the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel, and NHK World-Japan. She is also a frequent commentator on dinosaur science on the airwaves (Canadian Broadcasting Company and National Public Radio) and in print media (including the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, AP News Network, and The Conversation). Most recently, Curry Rogers extended her teaching to an audience of lifelong learners through a twenty-four-lesson course on dinosaurs for The Great Courses/Wondrium, available to stream. Macalester's DeWitt Wallace Professorships were established in 1976 through a gift from DeWitt Wallace, son of Macalester president James Wallace. He and his wife Lila Acheson Wallace co-founded Reader’s Digest in 1920.
As a vertebrate paleontologist, Curry Rogers's research focuses on documenting the evolutionary history and paleobiology of dinosaurs, particularly the long-necked giant sauropods. She employs modern biological tools such as comparative anatomy and bone histology to uncover insights into the lives of extinct dinosaurs. Her work has taken her far afield, with ongoing projects in Madagascar, Argentina, and Montana. Her notable research outcomes include deciphering growth specialization in the earliest known dinosaurs and their contemporaries, documenting the anatomy, evolutionary history, and paleobiology of the globally distributed titanosaurs, and exploring the relationship between microscopic patterns and whole-body growth dynamics in backboned animals, both living and extinct. Curry Rogers has also worked on much smaller fossils in Montana, where her work focuses on deciphering the identity and interactions of Cretaceous-era swamp dwellers. She has named two new species of dinosaurs from Madagascar and served as an editor on the volume The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology (University of California Press). Curry Rogers has authored or co-authored more than forty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, with her work published in top scientific journals, including Nature and Science, as well as in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Biological Letters, the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Paleobiology.
Throughout her career, Curry Rogers has secured funding to support her research (and that of her students) with grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Bureau of Land Management, the Keck Geology Consortium, and the David B. Jones Foundation. She is one of only three Macalester faculty members to have received a prestigious NSF CAREER Grant. Many Macalester alumni whose experiences began in the classroom, in the lab, or in the field with Curry Rogers have gone on to pursue geoscience and biological graduate research, artistic ventures, scientific publishing, science education, and many other adventures around the globe.
The Wallaces were noted philanthropists whose gifts generously supported Macalester as well as the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other organizations.
