Dr. Jessica Anderson Maisano, ’94, has been named the recipient of the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences 2014 Staff Excellence Award in recognition of her management of the High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility.
A Kent State University and Honors College alumna, Jessica graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts in geology. She was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1993. She earned University Honors for her Senior Honors Thesis entitled “Lobocarcinus Iumacopius: A new species of cancrid crab from Fayum, Egypt.” Her thesis was selected by the National Collegiate Honors Council for the Portz Prize in 1994 as the best honors thesis of the year in the natural sciences. Jessica was the first of Kent State’s seven Portz Prize winners.
Jessica joined The University of Texas in January 2000 after completing her Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology at Yale University. She is a research scientist associate in the High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT). Jessica has overseen the implementation of Digital Morphology: An NSF Digital Library (www.DigiMorph.org), an ongoing project that involves the construction of an online resource of high-resolution CT-based imagery of a broad diversity of fossil and Recent organisms; currently, the site features almost 1000 specimens. Jessica has also collaboratored on Deep Scaly, a project focusing on higher-level systematics of squamates (lizards, snakes, amphisbaenians) that is part of NSF's Assembling the Tree of Life initiative.