Distinguished Dissertation Awards Go To McMicken Students

When two of UC’s four University Dean Distinguished Dissertation Awards go to one college, its students and faculty must be doing something exceptional. This is certainly true in the case of Austin Hendy (geology) and Anthony Landreth (philosophy), who were recently honored by the University Research Council for their outstanding work. Both say faculty played major roles in their successes.

Hendy notes that Carlton Brett and Arnold Miller “share the onerous task’ of being his advisers. He adds, “Their wide-ranging wisdom, interest, and encouragement have made writing the dissertation an enjoyable experience and have immeasurably helped develop my scientific mind.”

Actually, the young New Zealander’s whole life has been a process of “developing his mind.” Hendy comes from a family of academics. He traveled widely with his father, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Waikato, and attended school in the United States, which gave him “a healthy dose of American culture at an early age.” He originally planned to study marine biology, but midway through his undergraduate career, he was hired as a lab assistant to identify the age and ecology of fossils for a lab of graduate students.

The experience changed his mind and became “the basis of an undergrad dissertation, then a Master’s thesis that has since evolved into the PhD dissertation.” His work involves examining the fossil record of New Zealand through the Cenozoic time interval, which encompasses the last 65 million years. He wants to know “how marine life evolved, particularly what processes have taken place in Earth’s recent geologic past to produce what we see floating, swimming, burrowing, and feeding in the ocean today.”

The task demands mining enormous amounts of literature and conducting field work in New Zealand, but Hendy is obviously doing a spectacular job. His co-adviser Arnold Miller observed, “I’m amazed at how much he has already accomplished in the field, in the laboratory, and on the computer. If he continues on his current track, there is little question in my mind that he has an extraordinary career ahead of him.”

Hendy hopes to do post-doctoral research and eventually work with museum fossil collections to make them more accessible and useful to researchers and educators at both K-12 and higher education levels.

Like Hendy, Tony Landreth has done a lot of traveling. But in his case much of it was in his mind and imagination. Landreth began college as an English major, intending to focus on creative writing. He was convinced that studying philosophy would improve his chances of becoming “a good novelist, but philosophy took over.”

He finished undergraduate work with a major in philosophy and a minor in English and followed up with “a few drafts of a novel, none of which were very good.” All the while he stayed current in the study of cognitive neuroscience and ultimately decided to attend graduate school in the field.

UC was a natural choice since there are only a few programs in the country that offer simultaneous study of philosophy and hands-on training in science. Landreth credits his adviser John Bickle with “bringing” him to McMicken: “He’s a philosopher who isn’t afraid to do some science or to render his philosophical views empirically testable.” Bickle returns the admiration, describing Landreth as “outstanding, one of the best in our graduate program.”

But even exceptional students can feel “burned out,” and Landreth admits to being initially unable to settle on a dissertation topic. Once he realized that “motivation was at the heart of” his problem, he had his topic. He decided to find out “why people do what they do by engaging the question: Where in the brain should you look to find people’s goals?” His project focused on developing a theoretical framework “to facilitate the localization of people’s goals in the brains with an eye toward figuring out how you could change them or engage them directly.”

Landreth’s plan now is to gain competency in computational neuroscience and render his philosophical views empirically testable. To accomplish that goal, he is working with Jeff Johnson in UC’s biomedical engineering program to learn computational neuro-modeling techniques. Eventually he hopes to apply for positions in philosophy.