My undergraduate mentee, Teagan Corpening, spent the semester working in the lab as a fellow in the GMU's Undergraduate Research Scholars Program. Her independent research project tackled topics of community succession and assembly on reefs, as a part of my larger coral settlement project. To cap off all her hard work this semester, Teagan presented her findings at the Celebration of Student Scholarship and Impact this month. Watch her video below to learn more about her project and results!
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I was just awarded a Ruth D. Turner Scholarship in Marine Biology from the Ruth D. Turner Foundation! These funds will support my biofilms project and allow me to use metagenome sequencing to create functional profiles of the biofilms growing on the settlement tiles. With this funding, I will be able to create detailed paired functional and compositional characterizations of biofilm communities through time and across spatial scales in an effort to better understand the role that the environment and microbial communities play in shaping patterns of coral settlement. I am extremely grateful to the Ruth Turner Foundation for their support of this project!
This is a short video I prepared for the Coral Reef Research Hub, whose generous funding is supporting the genotyping of the corals from two restoration programs in Roatán. The video explains what I am doing and why it is so important, and it features a short interview with the Roatán Institute for Marine Sciences' Education and Research Coordinator, Jennifer Keck. I just returned from a three-week trip to Roatán, where I volunteered as a research mentor for ten undergraduate interns participating in the Roatán Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) Coral Reef Research Internship. This was an incredible opportunity that allowed me to develop my skills as a teacher and mentor, practice my scientific diving, and deepen my relationships with my collaborators in Roatán! The first week was all about building practical field skills for the interns, so we practiced fish and coral identification and helped out in the coral nursery. We installed new coral trees, cleaned the existing trees, learned to fragment and hang the nursery corals from the trees, and learned how to outplant and map the grown fragments. The RIMS nursery is looking to expand their efforts to restoring boulder corals, so I helped the interns design an experiment to monitor health and growth of the new boulder trial fragments. During this time, I also worked one-on-one with each of the interns to discuss their observations during dives and explore their research interests. After this exploratory time, I helped the interns to develop research questions and experimental designs and guided them through drafting their research proposals. During the second week, I helped the interns with collecting their data and troubleshooting their methodologies, and in week three, I supported them through their data analysis and presentation of their results. Throughout the internship, the students helped me with my research, and I was able to teach them lab skills and molecular ecology topics!
This trip was extremely fulfilling for me personally and professionally. Over these few weeks, I was able to build lasting relationships with several members of the next generation of reef researchers and was able to share my love of the reefs with them. Mentorship is extremely important to me as a graduate student because of the life-changing impact my graduate mentor had on me as an undergraduate researcher; I strive to pay it forward. This trip improved my mentorship skills, as I learned to advise students from a variety of backgrounds on a wide range of reef-related topics, with projects ranging from microplastics in sponges to urchin dynamics across nutrient gradients. I was even able to attend the wedding of a family member who lives in Roatán whom I have not seen in years. I am so grateful to RIMS for hosting me, and I look forward to returning in the future! Greetings from Roatán once again! I am here this time for three weeks as part of the Roatán Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) Coral Reef Research Internship (more on that in a future post). However, while I am here, I was also able to collect the samples for my nursery genotyping project with the help of the interns. Over the course of four dives, we were able to collect samples from all of the elkhorn and staghorn corals in the RIMS and Roatán Marine Park coral nurseries. That’s 81 corals! We then brought them back to the lab for processing, where we scraped the coral tissue off of the skeleton and stored it in ethanol, and then performed DNA extractions. It was a huge effort on top of the standard intern activities, but many hands make light work! I am particularly proud of this project because it was co-developed with reef managers in Roatán and because the results will have a direct impact on the conservation and restoration of the reefs in Honduras. It is very important to me that my work in Honduras is not parachute science and that my results meet the research needs of local practitioners. By genotyping the nursery corals, this project will address the top research priority of these restoration programs and help to build resilience on restored reefs in Honduras!
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