Education

• Bachelor of Arts (2004-2008). College of William and Mary. Advisors: Rowan Lockwood and Karen M. Layou
• Master of Science (2008-2010). University of Georgia. Thesis: Abundance and extinction at the Ordovician/Silurian boundary of the Cincinnati Arch, USA. Advisor: Steven M. Holland
• Doctor of Philosophy (2010-2014). University of Cincinnati. Dissertation: Diagnosis and prediction of variations in the environmental distributions of marine fossils across time and space. Advisor: Arnold I. Miller

Selected Publications

• Holland, S.M. and A. Zaffos (2011). Niche conservatism along an onshore-offshore gradient. Paleobiology 37:270-286.
• Zaffos, A. and S.M. Holland (2012). Abundance and extinction in Ordovician-Silurian brachiopods, Cincinnati Arch, Kentucky and Ohio. Paleobiology 38:278-291.
• Zaffos, A. and A.I. Miller (2015). Cenozoic latitudinal response curves: Individualistic changes in the latitudinal distributions of marine bivalves and gastropods. Paleobiology 41:33-44.
• Brett, C.E., Zaffos, A., and A.I. Miller (2016). Niche conservatism, tracking, and ecological stasis: A hierarchichal perspective. Eldredge, N. and T. Pievani (Eds.), Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective, University of Chicago Press.
• Zaffos, A., Finnegan, S., and S.E. Peters. (2017). Plate-tectonic regulation of marine animal diversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:5653-5658.
• Peters, S., Ross, I., Czaplewski, J., Glassel, A., Husson, J., Syverson, V., Zaffos, A., and M. Livny (2017). Diving into published text, tables, and figures with GeoDeepDive. Eos 98.
• Barnes, B.D., Sclafani, J.A., and A. Zaffos (2021). Dead clades walking are a pervasive macroevolutionary pattern. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.

Selected Projects & Funding

• Technical Consultant, National Science Foundation (NSF EAR 0949416 2010-2016) Leveraging the Paleobiology Database for Research, Education, Mentorship, and Interoperability.
• Technical Consultant, Department of Defense (EN1567-16-01 2016-2017) Arizona Military and Energy Land Use Plan.
• Co-PI, National Science Foundation (NSF EAR 1550913 2017-2019) Collaborative Research: Leveraging domain repositories in flyover country, a mobile app for geoscience outreach, data discovery, and visualization.
• Co-PI, Department of Energy (DE-EE0008761 2019-2021) A high-throughput computing infrastructure to generate, custom, open Community Geothermal Datasets.
• Technical Consultant, Department of Energy (DE-FE0031837 2019-2024) Carbon Utilization and Storage Partnership (CUSP) for the Western USA.
• Co-PI, Department of the Interior (Various 2017-Present), National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program.
• Technical Consultant, Department of the Interior (Pending 2021-2022) Level Three GeMS Compilation Mapping and GIS infrastructure Development.
• Co-PI, National Science Foundation (NSF ICER 2026961 2020-2023) EarthCube Data Capabilities: Solutions for Paleobotany: a web client hosting novel content and its integration with existing databases.

Bio

I am a Senior Research Scientist and Chief of the Geoinformatics Research Division at the Arizona Geological Survey and University of Arizona. My primary interest is the extinction and diversification of marine organisms. Specifically, I study how patterns of marine deposition and erosion controlled fossil biodiversity throughout the history of complex animal life. I also study the phenomena of niche conservatism and biogeographic conservatism in ancient marine biotas, at both regional and global scales. I am currently part of several geoinformatics initiatives - the Macrostrat Database, Paleobiology Database, the Rockd and Flyover Country social media applications, and the GeoDeepDive Library of machine-readable scientific documents - which are all working to increase the accessibility of geoscience data for the scientific community and general public.