On October 1, the seventh cohort of graduates from the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School—the first Ph.D.-degree-granting program for any museum in the Western Hemisphere—will receive Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Comparative Biology at a commencement ceremony in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. We’re profiling these soon-to-be Ph.D.s.
It isn’t every day you discover your career mentor in grade school. But that was the case for Daniel Barta, who has just finished four years studying dinosaur growth and development under the Museum’s Macauley Curator Mark Norell in the Division of Paleontology.
“We were reading in elementary school about the first feathered dinos found in China, and I read a related article about Mark’s work in the Gobi Desert about nesting dinos,” Barta recalls. “I remember thinking Mongolia would be a cool place to travel and that maybe when I am a professor, I‘d get to do that!”
After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in Earth Sciences (specializing in Paleontology), Barta was accepted to the Richard Gilder Graduate School. Within a year he found himself accompanying Norell to the Gobi Desert on a joint expedition of the Museum and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, long before becoming the professor he’d dreamed about as a child. Soon after that, Barta co-authored a paper about a specimen of the ornithischian dinosaur Haya griva found there.
What surprised Barta most about his time in the Museum’s Ph.D. program was how much he came to appreciate the old along with the new. “I realized in a tangible sense what a great history the Museum had, the personalities behind the artifacts, and that I was a part of that,” he says. Through the application of new analytical approaches, including CT scanning and ultra-thin bone histology studies, the research on historical specimens remains at the cutting edge of science. “The Museum’s collections are that link,” says Barta.
Working with Norell and with his co-advisor Jin Meng, curator of fossil mammals in the Division of Paleontology, Barta published numerous scientific papers, served as a scientific advisor for and a co-instructor for the Lang Science Program high school course about the Museum’s traveling exhibition Dinosaurs Among Us, hosted an international press conference announcing the formal scientific name of the Museum’s recently-mounted titanosaur skeleton, and engaged with the Museum’s social media followers on topics ranging from dinosaur growth on Facebook Live to why pterodactyls aren’t dinosaurs.
Barta, who now lives in Whittier, California, has embarked on his professorial career, recently starting as a lecturer teaching human anatomy and introductory biology at California State University, Los Angeles.