Author: Sunshine Van Bael

Congratulations to Stephen Formel for successfully defending his prospectus and moving on to become a Ph.D. candidate! 🎉🎉🎉

Candice, Stephen and Sunshine attended the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science conference in New Orleans this week. Candice gave an oral presentation about her findings from Spartina alterniflora collected six years after the oil spill. Stephen presented a poster about his greenhouse study that is in progress. Sunshine sat for an interview […]

Liz Kimbrough represented the Van Bael lab at the World Conference for Science Journalists in San Francisco, California. She competed to win a fellowship, and here she is surrounded by fellow fellows, hailing from South Africa, Mongolia and Mexico. As part of the conference, Liz wrote two articles that reported on conference panels. The first […]

Last week, Lorena travelled to Colombia to teach a workshop in the analyses of genomic data. The workshop occurred at Colombia’s Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BIOS). We missed her in New Orleans, but we’re happy that 30 students were able to learn from Lorena’s expertise.   

The Van Bael lab hosted 3 great groups of boys last weekend and had some fun with pet endophytes. One student sent us a photo of his endophyte – see below!

Congratulations to George Washburn on the publication of his first paper, “Fungal diversity in galls of baldcypress.” George worked on this project while earning his master’s degree at Tulane. He is now a Ph.D. student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Download the .pdf here!      

In July, Peter and Sunshine travelled to Merida, Mexico for the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Peter presented his research from Barro Colorado Island, Panama about endophytes and leaf traits. It was his first formal oral presentation at a conference and he did a great job! Sunshine presented about her […]

This week, three biology teachers arrived in Panama to interact with the Van Bael lab, as part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Teachers program. The Van Bael lab team is excited to be joined by Ms. Katie Adler (East Jefferson High School). Ms. Jodi Sanchez (Lusher Charter School, middle school) and Ms. […]

In June, three schoolteachers from New Orleans joined our lab work as we prepared them for our trip to Panama. They are participating in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Teachers program. They each came to the Van Bael lab for several days to get acquainted with some of the basic techniques in endophyte […]