MS students Darrien Caudle & Madison Nelson presented their thesis work at the Graduate Research Symposium at the Student Center. They were 2 of 60 grads to participate in the symposium and had a steady flow of visitors to their posters! 

This spring, Joshlyn Rowland & Taylor Clay are joining the FUNGGii lab as undergraduate researchers. Joshlyn will be leading up a greenhouse project exploring how native Dauphin Island mycorrhizal fungi may promote salinity tolerance in Panicum, while Taylor is going to be looking at ghost crab burrowing density and movement around our disturbance x nutrient addition plots on Dauphin Island!  Should be a fun semester! Check out our People page for more info.

Emily found out today that she is being awarded the Walter F Coxe research grant to conduct some mechanistic greenhouse experiments to understand the role of coastal mycorrhizal fungi in dune grass growth, drought tolerance, and salinity tolerance.   These experiments will form the first steps to determining whether mycorrhizal fungi are a viable option for coastal dune restoration in the gulf coast.

Post-doc Angela Google had a new review paper come out yesterday in Studies in Science Education on the how undergraduate students approach studying biology!  This is a must read, check it out!!

New Paper led by Dr Kenna Rewcastle trying to understand what dominant plant removal does to ecosystem function across an elevational gradient!  Check it out!

We were down on Dauphin Island this morning working within our DRAGnet plots clipping aboveground biomass and we brought a few of the Biology graduate students along with us.  It was a beautiful sunny day to be working on the island!

J & Grace were in New Orleans to present some our work on First Gen College students. Grace did an amazing job! 

Madison defended her MS prospectus today!  Her thesis is entitled: Hidden & visible identities: their impact on in-class dynamics for active learning biology classrooms. She passed with flying colors and now can return to data analysis and writing (after a nap). Way to go Madison!!!

Graduate student Madison Nelson and undergraduate researcher Darrien Caudle were awarded a fellowship from the Equity & Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM) network fellowship to investigate whether an intervention to promote representation of scientists in STEM classrooms can improve relatability to scientists and stereotypes about who can be a scientist. We are super excited to get to work on this project!!