News & Announcements
Podos Elected President of Animal Behavior Society
Podos Elected President of Animal Behavior Society
Biology professor Jeff Podos has been elected the 2017-18 president of the Animal Behavior Society (ABS), the discipline’s principal scientific society in the Western Hemisphere. Read More
Laela Sayigh and team report progress in preventing mass dolphin strandings
Laela Sayigh and team report progress in preventing mass dolphin strandings
OEB faculty member Laela Sayigh is lead investigator on a team of researchers studying dolphins at Wellfleet Harbor on Cape Cod. This team may have found a way to prevent mass stranding events by listening to dolphin whistles (read more)
LSGRC 7th Annual Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium, Friday, November 17!
LSGRC 7th Annual Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium, Friday, November 17!
The 7th annual UMass Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium will be held on Friday, November 17. The event brings together graduate students from all areas of life sciences research at UMass to present their work in both talks (9:00am - 5:00pm, Life Sciences Laboratories Building, Room S340) and a poster session/lunch (12:30pm - 2:00 pm). This event is open to everyone who wants to learn about the fantastic life sciences work going on at UMass! The schedule for presentations is available on the LSGRC facebook page.
Crosby, Irschick Co-Direct New UMass Center for Evolutionary Materials
Crosby, Irschick Co-Direct New UMass Center for Evolutionary Materials
Polymer scientist Al Crosby and functional biologist Duncan Irschick, the inventors of the gecko-inspired adhesive, Geckskin, are co-directors of a new, system-wide UMass Center for Evolutionary Materials. It is intended to be a home for researchers from many fields who are interested in pursuing bio-inspired technologies to create new designs and products to benefit people and the environment.
Irschick explains that he and Crosby, inspired by the scientific and intellectual richness of their own collaboration and the success of Geckskin, want to see a center that will “engage people on a deep level of bio-inspiration, not as a buzz word but as a kind of intellectual playground for unstructured creativity. Such centers can be useful to foster collaborations.” Read more
Soil’s Contribution to the Carbon Cycle in a Warming World, UMass Amherst, collaborative research team identify four-phase pattern in microbes
Soil’s Contribution to the Carbon Cycle in a Warming World, UMass Amherst, collaborative research team identify four-phase pattern in microbes
October 5, 2017
Contact: Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444
AMHERST, Mass. – Microbiologist Kristen DeAngelis and her graduate student Grace Pold at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and in New Hampshire, report results in the Oct. 6 issue of Science from their study of warming-related soil carbon cycling changes in a New England hardwood forest.
Over two and a half decades, the team observed periods of substantial soil carbon loss, punctuated by periods of large changes in microbial communities – an episodic rather than steady pattern of warming-related change. DeAngelis and colleagues write, “We found that soil warming results in a four-phase pattern of soil organic matter decay and carbon dioxideflows to the atmosphere, with phases of substantial soil carbon loss alternating with phases of no detectable loss.” (Read more...)
OEB Science Café Videos
OEB Science Café Videos
OEB Science Cafe continues to go strong, as OEB's signature outreach activity. Amherst Media has filmed and edited some of our recent café events; the links are posted here: https://oebsciencecafe.org/previous-cafes/. So check ‘em out, in case you missed them the first time or just want to relive the magic!
Laura Hancock Awarded UMass Graduate School Pre-dissertation Research Grant
Laura Hancock Awarded UMass Graduate School Pre-dissertation Research Grant
Laura Hancock was recently awarded a $995 UMass Graduate School Pre-dissertation Research Grant to help cover travel costs and lodging for her preliminary field work this summer. Laura is planning on working with Leptonycteris yerbabuenae (lesser long-nosed bats) and other bat species in the desert southwest to better understand their foraging behavior and how possible species interactions might alter pollination of native plants. Laura is a PhD student in the Stinson and Podos labs.
Laura Hancock: Recent Publication and Conference Presentations
Laura Hancock: Recent Publication and Conference Presentations
Laura Hancock, along with her adviser, Kristina Stinson, and other collaborators, recently published work looking at how different ecotypes of the allergenic plant common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) respond to elevated levels of CO2. The paper was published in June 2016 in Oecologia and is titled "Northern ragweed ecotypes flower earlier and longer in response to elevated CO2: what are you sneezing at?"
Laura recently presented preliminary data from her master's thesis at two conferences, the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting and Botany 2016. Her presentations were about long-term metapopulation dynamics of the invasive plant garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) across a forest microhabitat gradient.
William Rodriguez-Reillo Awarded DOE Fellowship
William Rodriguez-Reillo Awarded DOE Fellowship
William Rodriguez-Reillo has been awarded a DOE fellowship in the Science Graduate Student Research Program. He will be conducting his fellowship at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington, for his project "Integration of high resolution soil chemical data and metatranscriptomics to determine the molecular mechanisms underlying ecosystem responses to long-term soil warming."
Michael Griego receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Michael Griego receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Congratulations to OEB student Michael Griego, who has been awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship by the National Science Foundation. The title of Michael’s project is “Body composition and comparative refueling performance during avian migration.”