Greetings! My name is Stacie Blair and I am a shipboard scientist participating in Expedition 317 going to the Canterbury Basin.  I am a micropaleontologist (I study very small fossils) and I study a particular fossil group called "calcareous nannofossils". 

These are ancient ocean algae and they can be used to tell us the age of sediments we are drilling into. I am PhD student at Florida State University (Tallahassee), but I am originally from a small town in northeastern Nebraska.