Madison Nelson successfully and fantastically defended her MS thesis yesterday entitled - The role of student identities and role model formation on college student sense of belonging and STEM career commitment. Madison is officially the first graduate from the FUNGGii lab and we could not be more proud of her.  Madison is now shifting gears and is moving into K-12 education and will be able to bring many of the lessons learned from her projects to her students to promote a more inclusive and supportive classroom.  Congrats!!!

J, Darrien, and Angela are in Minneapolis this week hanging with the Equity-Diversity in Undergrad STEM group chatting about ways to make STEM more inclusive for all. It has been great seeing so many friends faces in-person and not via Zoom and fun discussions about future projects and research directions!

We are super excited to add John Yerger, Emily Nation, Declan Godfrey, and Sarah Shelton to the FUNGGii lab for the summer!! To get to know them a little bit better, check out our people page!

A new paper led by Lauren Clance & Randi Cannon on student struggle during the transition for remote learning. Turns out that instructor's support and communication was a strong determining how well students were able to overcome their struggles.  Surprise :).

Grace Sekaya was awarded the inaugural Jaguar Senior Medallion Award this week, which awards outstanding graduate seniors that have made their mark on the South Alabama community both inside and outside the classroom!!

After some major Covid related delays in field work, we have finally got our disturbance experiment setup on Dauphin Island!  We are excited to have our coastal grassland included in the global network!!!

Lab undergrad Grace Sekaya was selected as a prestigious DIRECT (Diversifying Research and Experimental learning in Cancer Training) fellow at Duke University Cancer Institute.  This is an amazing opportunity and a great way to spend her gap year before starting Med School!  We are so proud!

Emily Newman had a dynamite prospectus defense this morning!!  She gave an amazing talk on her thesis linking native dune Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the restoration of coastal Alabama dunes.  We are excited to have her advance into candidacy for her MS thesis!!

New paper out in Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education this week that was actually part of our Biology Education Theory & Research course taught to graduate students across Biology, Education, and Marine Sciences.  Graduate students in this course get their first taste of DBER. Fun seeing class products shine!