2024 Katherine Palmer Award to Denise Porcello
November 4, 2024
Since 1993, the Paleontological Research Institution has presented the Katherine Palmer Award to an individual or individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of paleontology in an avocational role. The award is named for PRI’s second director, Katherine van Winkle Palmer (1895-1982), who held non-professional paleontologists in high regard and collaborated with many during her long career.
Denise Porcello has been a special education teacher and elementary teacher for over thirty years, most recently in Dracut, Massachusetts. She has initiated many supplemental programs within schools that focus on environmental stewardship, such as beginning and maintaining a recycling program, teaching students to tap maple trees and infusing agriculture projects into the curriculum daily. Denise runs an after-school STEM robotics program for underrepresented students to have extra opportunities to explore coding and robotics.
In an effort to self-teach herself to better serve her students, Denise sought out paleontology programs for elementary teachers. This led her to the University of Washington/ Burke Museum DIG School for teachers in 2014. After this experience, Denise wrote a nonfiction book, Dinogirl: Young Paleontologist, about a student she met on the dig, to inspire girls to pursue careers in science. The profits from the book are donated back to the program. This experience prompted her to seek out further opportunities and she became involved in the University of Florida’s program, participating in several digs in Florida and New Mexico. These opportunities allowed Denise to bring her experiences as a citizen scientist back to the classroom to share with her students.
To recreate the experience for her students, each year she obtains a box of matrix from the Aurora Fossil Museum in North Carolina and the excitement is contagious throughout the school. Denise has written and developed many lessons to enrich the curriculum for her students. From the dinosaur “tracks” leading to her classroom, to the many dinosaurs displayed in the room, there is no question where this teacher’s heart lives. Denise brings her personal collections to school so the students have the opportunity to touch real fossils and also uses these as a basis for her lessons. Her hands-on “museum” is described by her colleagues as inspirational to students and fellow teachers.
In 2018, Denise was a coauthor of a publication of the National Science Teaching Association called Connecting Fossil Clubs with K-12 Teachers in Connected Science Learning. Around the same time, she played an important role in encouraging the Commonweath of Massachusetts to declare Podokesaurus holyokensis as the State Dinosaur, which finally happened in 2022. The day it was announced, Denise greeted the students in the morning wearing a blow up dinosaur costume in the front of the school as the students were arriving. Denise presented at both the 2019 and 2024 North American Paleontological Convention meetings to share how she engages young learners with fossils, setting them up to appreciate and respect careers in science.
In sum, Denise Porcello is an exceptional teacher and mentor and inspirer, and the Paleontological Research Institution is proud to present her with the 2024 Katherine Palmer Award. Information about the Katherine Palmer Award, including instructions for how to make a nomination and a listing of past recipients, may be accessed here.