• COS Fluxes @ Harvard Forest,  COS Soil Microbiology,  Mentoring,  Uncategorized

    Carbon cycle tracers, an infographic

    I’m happy to present an InfoGraphic on Carbon Cycle Tracers created by University of Arizona art students Melissa Yepiz and Luke Williams in Prof Karen Zimmerman’s course on infographics. Creating this infographic on complex scientific concepts was not an easy task, but Melissa and Luke did an incredible job. Through this collaboration they have provided me with an invaluable resource for sharing my research to a range of audiences (and in a much more aesthetically pleasing way than usual). I learned a lot in the process, including how to better explain my science and to get down to the fundamentals of the message I wanted to share. I was blown away by the talent…

  • Uncategorized

    Soil art!

    I’ve had the pleasure of working with two fantastic UA art students (Luke Williams and Melissa Yepiz) through an Infographics class with Prof. Karen Zimmerman. Stay tuned for our infographic on carbon cycle tracers! As a side project, I’ve given the students some of each of the 20 soil samples from my recent study to constrain soil fluxes of carbon cycle tracers (COS and 18O-CO2, see story). I asked them to make a creative piece with the soils, highlighting differences in color, texture, etc… Luke’s piece nicely contrasts soil color using red Colorado river, gray Moab soils, and black Hawaiian soils within a geometric framework burned into wood. I’ll look forward to…

  • H2 Soil Microbiology,  Mentoring,  Presentations

    ISME conference on “the power of the small”

    Last week I attended ISME 14 (International Symposium on Microbial Ecology) in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a delight to see the city – its juxtaposed giant modern, cool, sterile buildings surrounding the historic old city. More of a delight was unexpectedly running into friends from the MBL Microbial Diversity summer school (2010) and realizing they are now my colleagues. The conference itself was quite good. I appreciated the range of content from very big picture and abstract to focused experimental projects. One message I took away from the community was a sort of -omics backlash, or perhaps whiplash, to the idea that generating more and more -omics data is the…

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  • H2 Soil Microbiology,  Mentoring

    Deepa receives Goetze Prize for Undergraduate Research

    At the 2012 EAPS Student Awards Ceremony Deepa Rao received the Christopher Goetze Prize for Undergraduate Research for her thesis entitled : “Exploring the Microbe-mediated Soil H2 sink: A lab-based study of the physiology and related H2 consumption of isolates from the Harvard Forest LTER.” The award recognizes ” innovative experimental design, care in data collection, and sensitive application of results to research problems.” It has been a pleasure to supervise Deepa’s thesis research and her results will contribute to our research efforts to understand the mechanisms driving the soil sink for atmospheric H2. Professor Ron Prinn acts as the faculty advisor for both Deepa and I.

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