 The past few months have been packed with field and laboratory work, and it would not have been possible without the help of my student assistants, Katherine Le and Elena Staguhn.
Elena is an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland who joined our lab this summer as a recipient of the SBC LTER National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant. She completed her own independent project examining the effects of debris deposited on Goleta Beach on nearshore marine sediment processes, and she presented her work at the Ocean Change Biology REU symposium at the close of the summer. In other exciting news, Katherine received the UCSB Worster Award, which is currently funding her independent project investigating zooplankton excretion in kelp forest canopies. More on her work to come! It has been a busy spring quarter filled with lots of teaching, new projects, and prepping for summer work! I was recently invited to present on struggles and strategies relating to using data science in the classroom at the UCSB Graduate Student Teaching Symposium. The conference was a great opportunity to meet fellow educators, and I enjoyed hearing others' ideas for encouraging student engagement and knowledge retention across disciplines.
One of my students, Lila, has begun work on her independent project examining beach hopper excretion in sandy beach sediments. The project is a close collaboration with Kyle Emery, another EEMB graduate student, and we cannot wait to have results in just a few short weeks! Another of my students, Katherine, was recently awarded the Worster Award which provides summer funding for an undergraduate student to perform research under the mentorship of an EEMB graduate student. She will be continuing a project examining zooplankton in local kelp forest canopies and is already busy planning her field work. Congratulations Katherine!! I will be attending the ASLO Summer Meeting in Victoria, British Columbia in early June and presenting part of my dissertation research in Session #11 - The Biogeochemistry of Organic Matter: Cutting Across Ecosystem Boundaries and Aquatic Gradients. More details on that and summer plans coming soon...  I am excited to announce that my application for emergency funding from the UCSB Associated Students Coastal Fund was recently approved. I will be using this grant to study the effects of the sediment deposited on Goleta Beach following the Montecito debris flow in January. Stay tuned for updates on the project, which will involve several collaborators and a fantastic team of undergraduates! If you'd like to learn more about the disposal of debris or current water quality at Goleta Beach, follow the links below.
 Chloe Smith, my NSF REU student from this past summer, has received the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography's Multi-cultural Program Fellowship to attend the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, OR. The fellowship establishes a cohort of young researchers who attend the meeting as a group, and it pairs them with a mentor for the duration of the meeting. In addition to attending various talks and panels, she will be presenting a poster on her research examining the effects of low pH on marine sediment biogeochemical processes. If you're headed to the meeting this spring, be sure to check out her poster as part of the Biogeochemical Processes Across Oxic-Anoxic Transitions session. Great work, Chloe!!
For more information about the ASLO Multi-cultural Program, click here. |
