Category: Lab News

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 […]

Please check it out on soundcloud!    

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!

Congrats to Candice and co-authors for their work on the endophytic and rhizosphere fungi of Spartina alterniflora – published in Science of the Total Environment. They compared heavily oiled and non-oiled areas and found that fungal community shifts are still evident in the heavily oiled areas, even six years after the oil spill. More oil […]

We enjoyed having Julia Simon, a Lusher high school student, working in our lab this past school year.  She especially thanks Liz and Steve for their mentorship and great advice about schools and careers over the school year. Now she is off to Stanford in the fall! Congrats and best wishes!

We are saying goodbye to a large group of undergraduates who worked in the Van Bael lab. And also one master’s student. We are grateful for your help and we will miss you a lot! Best wishes in your new adventures and please keep in touch…. fancy!

  Mini marshes! Steve sets up a new experiment to study how Spartina alterniflora germination and gene expression changes with oil pollution. Stay tuned to watch the growth (or not).

  We visited Miami to attend the annual meeting for the Florida Coastal Everglades  LTER project. We learned a lot and met a lot of new people. We visited an army of red mangroves on our way home. Field campaign planned for October. Mosquitoes, here we come!