The U-M Museum of Zoology was well represented at theWorld Congress of Malacology in late July 2013 with seven speakers and a best student oral presentation award for Jingchun Li.

Li won for her presentation titled “Freeloading to free-living: phylogeny, diversification and morphological evolution of the megadiverse marine bivalve superfamily Galeommatoidea.”

The talk, which was on Li’s major thesis research topic, was mainly about the diversification and morphological evolution of the group of clams (Galeommatoidea) that she studies. “It gave some new insights about how biotic and abiotic factors together affect the lineage diversification in marine systems,” she said.

Li’s research collaborators are her advisor, Professor Diarmaid Ó Foighil, who is the director and curator of UMMZ, and Ellen Strong, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History.

In addition to Li, UMMZ speakers at the World Congress of Malacology were: Professors Tom Duda and Ó Foighil; Taehwan Lee, research scientist; recent graduate Celia Churchill; and current graduate students Cindy Bick and Samantha Flowers. The event was held in the city of Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the archipelago of the Azores, a series of nine volcanic islands in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Caption: Jingchun Li receiving her award from Dr. Peter Marko, president of the American Malacological Society, at the World Congress of Malacology.