Dana Moore, NSF-REU student 2017
In summer 2017, Dana Moore worked with me at UCSB exploring soil ecology. She is interested in a range of subjects in biology, but particularly in the ecology of the rocky intertidal shoreline she grew up alongside. Her love for the ocean didn't stop her from applying for and completing a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates with me at UCSB this summer, and getting experience with savanna community ecology and biochemistry!
Dana spent nine weeks exploring differences in the total biomass of microbes in Kenyan savanna soils, depending on what landscape feature they were collected from or whether they were collected from experimental plots that allow wildlife like giraffes and elephants (or domestic cattle), or those that exclude them with electric fences. We're still working away on this project, so stay 'tuned for results in the coming year.
NSF-IGERT funding to build automated soil carbon flux chambers: 2017
in 2017, I was awarded a research grant from the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, with collaborator and UCSB professor Dr. Kelly Caylor, to design, build, and implement a network of automated soil carbon flux chambers. We will spend this fall perfecting the design, and are aiming to field-test them in the winter and spring at local field sites before taking them to Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, to deploy them in the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment; we'll use them in our efforts to better understand how carbon cycles in this savanna ecosystem, especially in response to experimental herbivore exclusion and land-use change.
Grace Lewin, NSF-REU student 2018
In summer 2018, Grace (an undergraduate at UC Davis) spent 10 weeks at Mpala with me, working on building, deploying, and collecting data from a network of 36 home-made and autonomous soil carbon flux sensors (aka "fluxbots"). Grace, whose previous expertise is in zoology and biology, is also a talented coder. Her cross-disciplinary skills served her in good stead in a project that required coding, engineering, and field ecology all at once!
Over the ten weeks we spent in the KLEE working on our fluxbot network deployment, Grace (pictured here with Alfred Ekaaz, a researcher at Mpala who worked with us) collected loads of data and came up with ingenious fixes for inevitable in situ problems.
2019 Fluxbots: version 2.0
In 2019, from winter and spring quarters through the end of summer, I worked with a talented group of students and researchers (both at UCSB and Mpala) to deploy version 2.0 of our fluxbots in the KLEE. Undergraduate researchers Vincent Benenati and Spencer Frey were indispensible as our computer science and engineering contingents, respectively, and Spencer came out to Mpala for the month of August to work on fluxbot deployment and data collection. Collaborators John Naisikie Mantas and George Koech, both Mpala researchers, kept the deployment going through mid-October 2019, when the rainy season cut our data collection abilities short. We collected over two full months of continous, hourly soil carbon flux data across 18 fluxbots, resulting in the largest dataset of its kind in this region if not the tropics. Stay 'tuned for our first publication from this dataset, currently under review!
New job: NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology at Yale University's School of the Environment
I have begun my new position as a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Oswald Schmitz (lab website here), where I'll be exploring large wildlife and carbon storage/cycling in a new system: the boreal forests of Newfoundland. There I'll be working with Drs. Schmitz and Shawn Leroux (Memorial University) to determine the effects of an ever-growing moose population on forest regeneration, the persistence of gaps in the canopy, and forest carbon storage and soil emissions.
I'm teaching!
During the summer sessions of 2020 and 2021, I was the instructor for "introduction to Ecology" this summer at UCSB, session A: six weeks of intensive immersion in the fundamentals of ecology for biology majors. In addition to these accelerated courses, I co-instructed the same course in spring quarter 2021 with Dr. Holly Moeller over 12 weeks.
I graduated!
On September 2nd, 2021, I successfully defended my PhD over Zoom with many friends, family, and colleagues. I'm so grateful to everyone who made it or got in touch; while finishing your degree during a pandemic was sub-ideal, I was bowled over by the support from folks near and far.
