Author: Sunshine Van Bael

We had another great workshop, getting girls excited about fungal ecology in the Van Bael lab. Thanks to all of the lab members who volunteered their time and also to workshop leaders. My favorite comment of the day was a girl coming up to me at the end of our workshop and noting that my name […]

Due to her success in the 2015 INTEL high school science fair, NASA has named an asteroid after Keiana Cave! We’re proud of your successes and happy to be working with you to push your project forward! http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=31959 Also here’s a link to an interview of Keiana in the local news: (link)  

We are welcoming Bri Bernik to the Van Bael lab. Bri received her Ph.D. at Tulane in Dr. Michael Blum’s lab, studying  the ecosystem consequences of genetic variation in Spartina in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. She’ll be joining us on our new GoMRI funded project to work on the response of bacterial communities to petroleum contamination in […]

Van Bael teamed up with a large group of authors to report on the best ways to manage tropical watersheds for ecosystem services. The report is based on research in the Neotropics. Here’s a link to an article about the report, and within this article you can hit another link to download the report. How to manage […]

We are very excited to announce our new grant funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. Go endophytes! Read more about it here! (link) This is a collaboration among researchers at Tulane (Van Bael, Papadopolous, Blum and Fauci), Duke Unviersity (Gunsch) and Louisiana State University (Pardue).  

We had another excellent Girls in STEM (GiST) workshop in the Van Bael lab last weekend! Huge thanks for the great turn out of undergraduates, volunteers and graduate students who want to inspire girls to become women in STEM!  I was at a welcome table this year with insects and a stereoscope — it was […]

It was a drizzly and fun day at the Hebert Center and twelve of our lab members helped plant 60 baldcypress trees.  Thanks for volunteering!

November 2014 Our laboratory hosted a Girls in Science and Technology (GiST) workshop on Saturday Nov. 8; the girls isolated and took home some pet endophytes to watch them grow. We are also developing a symbiosis game for our high school presentations – we’re loving Kim’s name for the game – “I Can’t Live Without […]

December 2013 Our lab sampled plants, fungi and bacteria from sites that were heavily oiled and not oiled during the BP oil spill. Demetra has lots of work to do in characterizing these diverse microorganisms. Sunshine travelled to Panama to catch up on some projects there and Kim explored northern Louisiana looking for Atta texana […]

News from 2012 December 2012 Van Bael joins a group of researchers and administrators from Tulane on a visit to the University of Havana in Cuba. https://tulane.edu/news/newwave/011513_cuba.cfm November 2012 New paper published in BMC Ecology: Leaf endophyte load influences fungal garden development in leaf-cutting ants.   August 2012 Kimberly Mighell officially joins the lab! Van […]