You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Uncategorized' category.
I realize it has been ages since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been keeping myself busy! I’m now hard at work preparing lectures for my upcoming course. I’ll be teaching non-science first year undergraduates all about microbes. Balancing this with research has taken up most of my time and brain power, so I’ve let this space languish a bit. I did want to share some highlights from the past few months, however.
Summer Collecting
The summer was a blast! The summer student that I was working with generated an impressive data set, and learned to analyze the data. He’s applying for medical school now while he finishes his final year of undergraduate. I pretty sure that this exposure to research gave him a few new insights into opportunities and career paths in science. We took one day out of the lab schedule to take all of the undergraduate summer students in the lab down to the seashore to see the seaweeds in situ.
The field day was one of the highlights of the summer. Seaweeds are notoriously difficult to identify in the field, but seeing them through the fresh eyes of students made us grad students realize that even though we might not be able to put Latin names on every species of branched red alga, we actually do know our stuff! I was also impressed at how eager all the students were to find and identify the seaweeds that they were working on. Here are some photos from that day.
This is the mid-low intertidal zone, and the tide pool has lots of kelp in it!
It was a beautiful day, with a bit of fog. It is days like this that remind us how much we love the work we do!
I also went on two collecting trips, one to Quadra and Cortes Islands in British Columbia. Here, I collected the red algae Porphyra. There are about 20 species of this genus in BC and it is better known as nori, the seaweed that is used as a wrap for sushi. The goal of my project is to develop a molecular tool to distinguish among the species. I also travelled the coast of Nova Scotia this summer, where we stumbled on some pretty amazing collecting sites, and nearly got eaten by black flies. Here are a few photos from those trips.
On Cortes Island, pressing Porphyra specimens
In this photo, I’m preparing to press some specimens onto herbarium paper. This preserves the seaweed for future analysis. A small sample is taken and dried in silica gel to be later used in DNA analysis.
Here are a few photos from Nova Scotia.
Peggy's Cove Intertidal Zone
Collecting in an estuary
My first publication
The other highlight of the last few months has been the publication of my first scientific article. The research that I did during my first two years in graduate school came out in September in the journal Botany (formerly known as the Canadian Journal of Botany). The paper is called “Assigning morphological variants of Fucus (Fucales, Phaeophyceae) in Canadian waters to recognized species using DNA barcoding” and can be found here.
The here and now
As I mentioned, I’m currently working on lecture material as well as research. While this is keeping me busy, I’m keeping in touch with Web 2.0 things by becoming more active on Twitter. This microblog website has already lead to one major international collaboration, and several smaller but also very useful connections. I’ll be the education project partner in a new multilingual education website for children, but this is so new that I can’t mention details just yet. In smaller collaborations, I’ve shared resources with educators, and made connections with people across the world. This tool has opened many new doors for me, so I recommend you check it out!
The future of this blog
While I had hopes for weekly updates when I started this blog, I think occasional updates are more realistic. I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences as a first-time sessional instructor next term.
I’m really enjoying the start of this partnership. The summer student has a keen eye for detail, learns really quickly and asks many questions. I’m particularly impressed with the types of questions he asks. Each question shows not only that he’s paying attention, but that he’s anticipating what will happen next.
Over the last few days, we’ve been working together to edit and align sequence data. This involves interpreting the output of the most high-tech piece of equipment in our lab (the automated sequencer), and making judgement calls in cases where the machine can’t do it for us. Just to quickly boil things down, the sequencer reads fluorescently labeled DNA to output a graph from which we read the sequence. (A fairly good summary can be found here.) For various reasons, including that this technique is not perfect at matching sequence peaks to the correct nucleotide, we have to manually edit the sequences. Now that we’ve practiced a bit together, and I’m sure the summer student can do this on his own. He’s pretty happy about that too, since he is interested in learning about data analysis, and this is the first step.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be heading into the field again, this time for about a week, and following that, I’ll be attending the Let’s Talk Science Partnership Program National Conference. This means that the summer student will be on his own while I’m away. There are lots of other people in the lab, so he can ask questions whenever he needs to, but I think it will be great for him to work independently while I’m away. I’ve found that some of my most memorable learning experiences in science have been times when I’ve had to figure things out on my own. We had a chat today, and I feel confident that he’s going to have a productive time while I’m gone.
This is my first attempt at blogging and web publishing. Things will be improving and changing over the next few days.
