University of Nebraska State Museum
I am currently working as an educations program assistant. I am developing and designing activities for museum events, developing educational guides and activities for museum galleries, and reviewing museum rental kits for scientific accuracy.
I assisted in the acquisition and cataloguing of a new Pliocene/Pleistocene megafauna collection (1,000 + specimens). I documented, labeled, and organized new specimens. I have also assisted in re-labeling old museum specimens. Outside of the museum collections, I worked at museum events, including developing a new “Paleo Timeline” that examines important paleontological events throughout the history of the field, modifying a ‘Go Fish’ style of evolutionary card game, and helping monitor the fossil dig boxes. I have also served as a student ambassador for the museum, attending various public outreach events in town as representatives for the museum where I supervised children activities, provided information about the museum, and lead drop-in tours of the museum exhibits.
Sternberg Museum of Natural History
During the summer of 2021, I developed and taught a virtual high school science camp on Permian Paleontology. I worked closely with the camps director to build a virtual field environment with geologic and paleontological data provided for students to work to create stratigraphic columns. We have just submitted research on the virtual field environment to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Conference as a talk for a new symposium on education and outreach using paleontology. I also served as a teaching assistant for a field course in Colorado and Utah where we did a two-week tour of museums and field localities in the area pertaining to famous dinosaur finds.
Arizona Natural History Museum
I described and catalogued Pleistocene fossil specimens received from Northern Arizona Quaternary Sciences Program, working with curator Dr. Robert McCord and collections manager Gavin McCullough. I identified specimens to their taxonomic group and skeletal description while digitally cataloguing them using Proficio/ReDiscovery software.
Museum of the Rockies
As part of my Museum Studies internship, I worked with Prof. David Swingle on using technical anthropology to convert and catalogue paleontological video archives from various tape formats into digital format. I also volunteered in the Jack Horner Paleontology Lab, where I prepared a fossil jacket of a Triceratops brain case.
Skills/Expertise
- Air Scribe
- Air Abrasion Unit
- OSX and Windows
- SQL, Mesquite, PAST4, R statistics language
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Adobe Creative Cloud Suite
- ESRI ArcGIS
- Photogrammetry
- Proficio/ReDiscovery
Devra Hock, Ph.D. 