As a child in Washington, D.C., Ewan Wolff ’01 loved dinosaurs. Visiting the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History at every opportunity, he would gape at the dinosaur models there, and return home to organize and reorganize his fossil collection into the twilight hours.

Wolff chose Bates as the site to quench his paleontological thirst. "I came to Bates loving paleontology and wanting to work on dinosaurs. I left Bates still wanting to do that, but I also cared more about environmental change and found that I had a great passion for reconstructing ancient ecosystems." A summer 2000 research grant brought Wolff to England, and the results of his trip were realized in the spring of 2001, as he earned honors for his thesis, "The Paleoecology and Lithofacies Evolution of the Earnley Sand Formation and Marsh Farm Formation at Whitecliff Bay, Isle of Wight, Great Britain."

"I felt as if I had become a scientist at last," Wolff says. "I have also learned that nothing can be predicted — you have to be flexible in any science that you do and learn to enjoy the twists and turns that you go around to get to a conclusion."

When not in the field or the lab, Wolff relishes negotiating the unpredictable curves supplied by rivers. A nationally-ranked junior Olympian in whitewater slalom kayaking in high school, Wolff will ride his wave of academic success from Bates to Brown University, where he will begin graduate study in an M.S./Ph.D. program in earth systems history this fall. Someday, Wolff hopes to be a professor of paleontology or paleoecology and teach college students the science that has captivated him since his earliest visit to the Smithsonian.

-- By Nick Bournakel '01