User:Marielle Fields Newsome

I am an Ph.D. student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. I graduated with Honors in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY in May 2008.

My primary interest in contributing to the Citizendium is in the field of animal behavior; however, I've contributed to articles on Wikipedia in other areas of biology, chemistry, and physics, and expect to do so here as well. I am also interested in scientific classification. My organisms of choice generally belong to the class ''Insecta''. As for nonscientific interests, anime, manga, and other aspects of Japanese popular culture are a hobby of mine. I am also an avid reader of both fiction and non fiction.

Current Projects

I decided to take this write-a-thon to put in entries for every order in the class Insecta. It has been a total source nightmare. I started with Peterson's Field Guide. I got to the order Orthoptera... and it included cockroaches! Good lord. The last time I checked, cockroaches were in their own order (and there was a 2007 paper suggesting they should actually be a suborder in Isoptera, but the dust hasn't settled on that yet). And then I realized that despite the fact that I bought the field guide in my teenage years, it hadn't been updated since 1970. So I brought out my Nat'l Audubon Society Field Guide, which is copyright 1995. Better, but a lot has changed.

After all that, I discovered ITIS. As it claims to be an authority, I will be using that. I notice that wikipedia uses quite recent material in their classification, but I'm hesitant to do that, mostly because taxonomy is often interdependent. Marielle Fields Newsome 16:59, 4 June 2008 (CDT)