Eugenia Gold
Instructor
Education
PhD, Richard Gilder Graduate School 2015
MS, University of Iowa 2011
BS, University of Maryland 2008
Email
mariaeugenia.gold@stonybrook.edu
My research interests broadly include archosaurian morphological evolution, but I mainly work on the evolution of flight in theropod dinosaurs through neuroscience. I use high-resolution imaging techniques (like Computed Tomography (CT)) to reconstruct the endocranial shape of extinct non-avian theropods and modern birds and analyze how their brain shape changes along using geometric morphometric techniques. I use Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to complement these analyses of brain shape. PET allows us to image activity in different areas of the brain of living animals while they are performing a behavior like flight. Using PET, we can analyze which areas of the bird brain are used during flight and correlate that to patterns of enlargement of the theropod brain during the acquisition of flight.
