Lab News (Sept. 1, 2005 - Sept. 1, 2006)

Coming and Going

Alex Poulain, a graduate student from the University of Montreal, has spent 7 weeks with us in the fall of 2005. Alex, who studies mercury cycling in the high Arctic, looked at merA genes and their expression in Arctic microbial biomass. A manuscript describing his results is in preparation.

Pat Lu-Irving, who completed her undergraduate studies at the university of Sydney, Australia, has joined our lab as a technician in the fall of 05. In addition to keeping the lab going Pat is working on the DOE subsurface project.

Dr. Yanping Wang has joined the lab last Dec. as a postdoctoral fellow. Yanping, who got her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), is analyzing community structure of subsurface communities that are exposed to mercury.

Two undergraduate students, Chris DiPasqulae and Justin Crane, graduated in May and left the lab for jobs in the private industry.

This summer we hosted two high school students. Daphne Ezer, who came to us through the Liberty Science Museum’s program “Partners in Science”, worked with Riqing Yu on the detection and analysis of merA genes in the microbial biomass of Sunday Lake. Nikki Ogunfowora (a SEED trainee) was introduced to molecular biology by assisting Yanping Wang in her research.

Honors and Awards

Kritee and Melitza Crespo-Medina won the outstanding student poster awards at the 8th International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant held in Madison, WI from 6-11 August, 2006. A total of only four student poster awards were given at the conference! See below to get copies of their posters.

Kritee got the Cook College/NJAES's Scientific Communication Award for her research presentation in March 2006.

Aspa Chatziefthimiou, Kritee and Melitza Crespo-Medina got Karl C. Ivarson Student Assistance Fund Award to support their attendence of conferences in the summer.

Conferences and Presentations

The summer of 2006 was highlighted by our participation in the 8th International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant, which was convened in Madison, WI (Aug. 6–11). We presented 5 posters at that meeting which covered the range of work that is carried out by out lab. Posters were presented by Heather, Melitza, Kritee, Riqing, and Sharron. Click on each name if you would like to see our posters. Tamar organized and convened a lecture/poster session on “Mercury (micro)biogeochemistry: missing links and new developments” at the conference.

Aspa, Kritee, Pat and Tamar went to Blue Mountain Lake, NY to attend NEMPET meeting in June 2006.

Tamar visited several universities throughout the year where she presented our work on mercury biogeochemistry and on horizontal gene transfer. In Sept. 06 Tamar will participate in an Okazaki Biology Conference on “Terra Microbiology II”, a six days conference in Okazaki, Japan, where she will present our gene transfer work in a session on “gene hopping”