Ana Swor

I grew up in rural – Colombia where I graduated in business administration. Although I moved to the US with the idea of learning English and continue to pursue my initial career, over the years I decided to follow my heart and went back to school to become a geologist. Geology has been my dream career ever since I was a child. But the lack of schools that offered the program in my small town in Colombia, and my father’s idea that geology was a men’s career, sent me on different path then. Now, that I am finally studying what I love, I couldn’t be happier.

This semester I started working in my undergraduate research with Dr. Joseph Collette. Dr. Collette and I will be travelling to Mosinee, Wisconsin later in the summer to do field work. We will be taking measurements, recording types and orientations of ripple marks, strike and dip orientations, and collect all kind of samples that would help us to correlate separate quarries together and measure the geometry of the intertidal zone. By correlating the quarries, and quantifying the geometry of the intertidal zone, we will be able to provide a metric for assessing selection pressures on Cambrian intertidal organisms. This is a very exciting research, not only for the field work it involves, but also because it may clarify some of the questions about how animal life from aquatic and marine environments make their transition onto dry land.

Ana Swor