Lab Updates:

May 2022: Academic year 2021-2022 is DONE! LO-SPAT Project Manager Ann Fairly Pandelides helped put on the first project All-Hands meeting earlier in the month, and the first salinity challenge experiments are about to kick off with our collaborators at LSU AgCenter and UMCES Horn Point. Gulce Kurtay passed her comprehensive exams and advanced to Ph.D. Candidacy, and Julia Sweet successfully defended her dissertation proposal! Congrats, ladies! Beth traveled to Grand Rapids for her final ASLO Board Meeting as a Member-at-Large and to present some of the HERS Network activities. She was joined by Andrea Jaegge, who is wrapping up her PhD and looking for next steps, and three former REU participants in the Healthy Streams Healthy Coasts program (Collin, Jake, and Vanessa) who presented their research and networked their butts off. Altogether an amazing, energizing, and exhausting week in Michigan!
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Former REU participants Collin Hebner (TAMU), Jake Snyder (PSU), and Vanessa Baker (RIT) joined Beth at the JASM meeting in Grand Rapids to present their research and network!
​​Feb 2022: Happy Mardi Gras from Lafayette! The lab did a king cake tasting last week (spoiler alert: Keller's won!) and, after a year with no celebrations, the Fattest of Tuesdays is soon to be upon us. There are lots of other fun things happening, too! Ph.D. student Julia Sweet's paper on phytoplankton biomass and composition in 4 Louisiana estuaries is out now in Marine Pollution Bulletin! UL achieved R1 status, and the Stauffer Lab participated in a celebration of that success, sharing with the campus community and state representatives some of the cool research happening in our group. And Beth was recognized as Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor for the College of Sciences (2019-2020) and for Outstanding Achievement in Externally Funded Research (2020-2021). Let the good times roll, indeed!

Aug 2021: What a busy, crazy, awesome, and healthy summer! We hosted 13 students in the NSF-funded Healthy Streams, Healthy Coasts REU program; grad student and undergrad researchers ALL made excellent progress on their projects; got a paper accepted with new RCN-HERS colleagues on ecosystem responses to hurricanes; and kicked off the new LO-SPAT Project with colleagues. The ongoing pandemic has delayed formal announcement of the LO-SPAT project, but stay tuned on how the lab and Dr. Stauffer (Lead PI) are helping to make our Louisiana oyster populations and reefs more resilient to current and ongoing change (and we're hiring! See People page for details on open positions)

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