Author: Sunshine Van Bael

Mareli, a Ph.D. student in the Van Bael lab, joined the graduate student course in tropical biology this summer. She traveled to several sites in Costa Rica with the Organization for Tropical Studies. While there, she had the chance to learn about plant systematics, conservation grant writing, podcast-production, and intense experimental design/hypothesis testing. She also worked with sea hares […]

We are so proud of our newest graduates and their successes! Dr. Liz Kimbrough will be starting a job as a grant writer at Dillard University in New Orleans. Dr. Tellez has a visiting professorship position at Tulane University in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Congratulations!  We also had three undergraduates who finished […]

Today the department celebrated the year end with a picnic under the science oak. Departmental awards were announced, and two members of the Van Bael lab were honored with awards.  The George Henry Penn award is for recognizing outstanding graduate research in the department. Peter Tellez was the recipient! Here’s his shout out: Peter has […]

We are excited to announce that Nathalie Clarke won the prestigious Goldwater Fellowship in the natural sciences! This is a national award given for scholarship and excellence in research. Nathalie has been working in the Van Bael lab since 2018 and we are very proud of her accomplishments! 

This month our mangrove endophyte cultures made the Tulanian magazine cover…these cultures were plated by me in the frantic moments before I left for Japan – and here they appear with all of their endophyte glamour… Read on through the pdf to get updates about research happening in Tulane EEB to understand coastal issues in […]

Many years of graduate work have come to fruition lately, in the Van Bael lab! In December, Liz Kimbrough told us all about baldcypress trees and how their microbiome is influenced by salinity and other factors related to degradation. We saw how her commitment to these majestic trees took her from swamps to long hours […]

Congratulations to Liz Kimbrough for her first publication as a first author. Our work on baldcypress endophytes became available online yesterday, and you can read the article here!  Among many honors, she was also a recipient of the NSF GRFP award. Liz is going to be defending her dissertation in early December. Her plans are to […]

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We are so proud of our alumni! 

Congrats to lab members for presenting their research at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. We didn’t have far to go this time! All told, the lab presented nine different talks or posters, and we saw some old friends and their new work as well.  Great job everyone!