I certainly found my niche in paleobiology!

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Aside from that, I have many passions that drive me and shape who I am. One of my goals is in student outreach within the realm of geosciences. To my knowledge, I am the first female Saudi paleontologist. I also draw digitally and with charcoal, and sometimes use that for science. The magnum opus of my creative endeavors is a high fantasy novel I am in the works of writing and hope to publish someday, and incorporates elements of geology into it!

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Snapshot of my research: A phenomenon known as taxonomic homogenization, in which ecosystems are reduced in their spatial diversity as native fauna become replaced by invasive species, has been known to occur following the end-Permian mass extinction (~252 million years ago), but the mechanisms driving this pattern is unknown. In articles published at Stanford and Discover Magazine,  we call this phenomenon the "Great Dulling" , since ecosystems became compositionally more similar regardless of how far apart they were in the world. My research, published in Science Advances,  explains this pattern via the survival of organisms that were physiologically able to tolerate warmer, lower-oxygen ocean conditions after the extinction event. As the oceans became more uniformly hot and oxygen-poor, these survivors were able to expand into new habitats by taking advantage of aerobic niches that less tolerant species could no longer occupy.

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I also identify the fossils of marine invertebrates that survived the direct aftermath of the end-Permian mass extinction. Read my article on some of the field work I conducted on earliest Triassic bivalves in Saudi Arabia, which intertwined lessons from my family history and from ancient history in one of Saudi Arabia's top newspapers,  Al-Riyadh newspaper, here !

Learn more about my research here.