Dr. Alycia Stigall
Dr. Alycia Stigall, Professor of Geological Sciences, was elected to serve as a voting member of the Subcommisson on Ordovician Stratigraphy (SOS) for 2020-2024. The subcommission is part of the International Commission on Stratigraphy an international body of geoscientists tasked with “setting global standards for the fundamental scale for expressing the history of the Earth.”
The primary work of the SOS is to establish global standards for identifying and correlating geologic units of Ordovician age (485-444 million years ago) globally.
The Ordovician Subcommission comprises 20 voting members who are have each been recognized by their peers and colleagues have recognized for contributions to Ordovician stratigraphy and other aspects of research into the System as being of global importance.
Most of Stigall’s research career at Ohio University has focused on better understanding the fossil record of the Ordovician Period. This includes the well-known, abundantly fossiliferous units around Cincinnati, Ohio, for which Stigall has produced fossil identification resources online and in app form.
Stigall also has traveled internationally both exploring Ordovician rocks on four continents and sharing her research on six continents.
Stigall is a co-leader of the UNESCO funded International Geoscience Programme Project 653, “The onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE)” which bring together an international community of scientists to investigate the initiating causes and processes that produced the rapid diversification of marine organisms during the Ordovician Period. The GOBE includes a series of diversifications that completely modified marine food webs and that, for the first time in geological times, established modern marine ecosystems. As part of her work with IGCP 653, Stigall has welcomed her international colleagues to Ohio University by hosting the major Ordovician conference of 2018 on campus and co-organized the 2020 Annual Conference, “Zooming in on the GOBE” as a virtual conference that brought together more than 200 scientists from 29 nations.
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