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Lab Updates:
Oct 2022: The past month has been one of the most exciting since I started this little group in 2015! The first Stauffer Lab Ph.D. student, Andrea Jaegge, successfully defended her dissertation AND had her first, first-author paper accepted into Hydrobiologia! She is wrapping up her research here at UL before moving west to start a postdoc focused on HABs with the USGS California Water Science Center. Congrats Dr. Jaegge! We have also been thinking about and working on our lab, campus, and institution. As a lab, we wrote an Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Statement that you can read on our People page. We'd love to hear your feedback on it, and we want to keep putting action to those words. After 2+ years of Beth bugging people and angrily tweeting and the Office of Campus Diversity taking charge in the past 6 months, Facilities finally installed some gender inclusive bathroom signs in academic buildings across campus. Jen has been active in pushing back against a speaker visiting campus later this month who is known for hate speech and disinformation. We are excited to keep working to improve our community in the months and years ahead. 
A celebratory lab photo following the successful defense of DR. Andrea Jaegge!!
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!
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) For older news, click here |
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