Dr Robyn Pickering is difficult at the job on UCT’s brand brand new dating laboratory, due to be launched on 22 October. The lab develops on UCT’s reputation in geochemistry, rooted in the isotope that is radiogenic arranged a decade ago.

By the right time Dr Robyn Pickering had finished college she’d toured Sterkfontein Caves and read all palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey’s publications.

Coupling her passions in geology and palaeoanthropology, Pickering qualified being an isotope geochemist and has now dated some fossil that is noteworthy: Australopithecus sediba at Malapa, a substantial South African hominid site, and a million-year-old fossil monkey through the Caribbean that vanished 3 000 ago.

The outcomes of this fossil monkey dating, work done while she is at the University of Melbourne, were established just 3 months into Pickering’s UCT visit during the Department of Geological Sciences.

Fresh from a six-year stint being a postdoc in Professor Jon Woodhead’s lab at Melbourne, Pickering’s work is always to set up a “clean” uranium show dating laboratory (using uranium-lead and uranium-thorium) into the division. [Read more…]