Sean Faulkner

Faulkner looks on with Dr. Margulis at an excavated sample from Erfoud, Morocco.

In addition to a life-long pursuit of trying to understand the natural world, Sean also plays the guitar, is an avid golfer and skier, obsesses about Boston-based and fantasy sports, tours with Phish, and enjoys time with friends and family, especially hiking with his wife Leigh, and their dog, Ruby. He plans to pursue a career in teaching and research.

Nuptials on Long Beach Island.

Irregular concentric lamina are evidence of biogenicity.

FaulknerCV.pdf

Sean Faulkner is a graduate student in the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts. His research experience and interests include environmental evolution, origins of prokaryotic and eukaryotic life, bacterial metabolism, geomicrobiology, sedimentology, and paleoclimatology. Sean earned a M.S. in 2010, producing a thesis The Distribution, Composition, and Formation of Sahara Desert Microbialites From the Base of the Meski Plateau, outside Erfoud, Morocco. This geomicrobiological research involved museum-quality calcite-cemented sand concretions from the Moroccan Sahara, and whether the calcite cement and bizarre unique morphologies are a function of microbial mediation. Selected samples are on display at the CosmoCaixa Museum of Science in Barcelona, Spain, where he and Dr. Margulis have been asked to aid in the development of the exhibit.

For the past eight years, from undergraduate student through graduate school, Sean has assisted the Margulis lab with various research projects and lab activities. Faulkner has been both a research assistant (RA) and a teaching assistant (TA) for the lab, which has included designing, developing, and digitizing course material media, most notably the Digital Interactive Lecture Series (DIALS). From 2005-2010 Sean coordinated the Extra Credit Program for the Biology 280: Evolution class taught by Dr. James Walker and Dr. Margery Coombs. Sean has been the teaching assistant for Geo 483/Bio 597/OEB 797: Environmental Evolution since 2007.

Faulkner’s current research is focused on microbial mediation of carbonate concretions, cave ecosystems and associated bacterial metabolism, Neo- and Mesoproterozoic paleobiology, and deep-water coral endosymbiosis. To view Faulkner’s curriculum vitae please click the link.

Personal note: I will assist teaching Environmental Evolution in its final semester before it becomes a Continuing Education course (still taught by Bruce Scofield) here at UMass after the untimely death of my friend and longtime advisor, Lynn Margulis. After the lab closes at the end of the 2011-2012 academic year, I will continue to pursue a career in research and teaching, embodying Lynn’s teaching spirit and love for nature at every opportunity. Although this unfortunate event might steer me in a different path, I will always embody Lynn’s spirit in the way I view the natural world, mankind’s intrinsic obsession with destroying it, and teaching future generations ways in which to nurture it.

“Life… is…controlled artistic chaos…a set of chemical reactions so staggeringly complex that more than 4 billion years ago it began a sojourn that now, in human form, composes love letters and uses silicon computers to calculate the temperature of matter at the birth of the universe."

“The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about [when talking of saving the Earth] is saving themselves…their middle-class lifestyles and…their cash flow.”

Lynn Margulis

1938-2011