Category: Lab News

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! 

Check out our new paper – based on leaf trait data collected 18 years ago in Panama! These data have been used in several publications and continue to inform how we understand tropical trees.

Last week, Trey presented a poster about our baldcypress flooding and drought experiment. The presentation was at the Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching poster session, at Tulane University. Great job Trey!

Congrats to Clare for presenting and successfully defending her undergraduate honors thesis entitled, “Plant-pathogen warfare: investigating how leaf age affects host resistance to a fungal pathogen.” Stay tuned for a possible publication of this work!