Dr. Kemp has just finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and is in the process of starting her lab at UT Austin as of September!

Dr. Kemp attended Williams College in Western Massachusetts, as a first-generation college student and Questbridge Scholar. She completed her Ph.D. under the mentorship of Dr. Elizabeth Hadly at Stanford University, where she began studying the evolution of tropical lizards. During her Ph.D., she was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She also received funding from National Geographic. After leaving Stanford, she moved to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where she was funded by both the National Science Foundation and the Harvard Center for the Environment. She is involved in many different types of outreach, particularly with organizations that increase STEM access to girls, low-income and first-generation students, and others who are underrepresented in science.

The Quaternary Period, which started 2-3 million years ago and continues to the present, has not had a stable climate: there have been several ice ages with warmer periods in between them. Each of these changes in climate have been accompanied by extinction of some species, which has allowed for expansion of others. Dr. Kemp’s research uses fossils that were created during this period to study how different species respond to changes in sea level and other changes to their physical habitat, as well as introduction or loss of neighboring species. In particular, she is focused on the Caribbean, which has been understudied to date (in part because tropical conditions are not great for preserving fossils).

In a 2016 paper, Dr. Kemp and her Ph.D. advisor examined a group of fossils from Anguilla in the Lesser Antilles. They were able to identify 4 genera of lizard: three that are still found in the Lesser Antilles, and one (Leiocephalus, the curly-tailed lizard), which is found elsewhere in the Caribbean but not on Anguilla. By comparing specimens that were fossilized at different points in time, they were able to ask what happened to the other three after Leiocephalus was wiped out. They found that Leiocephalus was probably wiped out before the first human settlement on Anguilla, making it unlikely that humans were responsible. Fossils from the other three genera suggest that individual lizards became larger and that the populations expanded after Leiocephalus was lost. This suggests that Leiocephalus was formerly a predator for these other species, compatible with what is known about it in other areas of the Caribbean.

As the global climate continues to change, this research helps predict the accompanying shifts in biodiversity, including which species are likely to be lost first and which may benefit from fewer competitors and/or predators.