another exciting summer underway (holy crap - 1/2 over!) here in the lab at University of San Diego. I am lucky to have my previous graduate students finishing up their work, another joining the lab (graduate webpage HERE), and three great undergrads in the lab, working on really interesting questions.
Alex Blanco is a McNair Scholar, continuing work in my lab, but his research is taking him in a new direction. Alex is working on an important but little-studied habitat in southern California wetlands - pools in the vegetated marsh. We are trying to better understand their distribution, and figure out if new technology (camera-equipped drones) can help us more cheaply and efficiently map these and other small-scale features in our wetlands. Of course, being Alex, he also pitches in around the lab, helping us with our other studies as well.
Yuri Bejarano also just joined the lab this summer, a transfer student from New York who is part of University of San Diego's Pre-Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) Program. Despite the name, the PURE program, under the direction of our (great) new Director of Undergraduate Research, Dr. Sonia Zárate, now also takes transfer students, and I was fortunate to have Yuri choose my lab. She is helping me work on Fundulus parvipinnis (shocking, I know!), and is helping us get a better handle on some of the basics - ontogenetic shifts in diet; length-weight relationships; and the stable isotope signatures of females and some of their component tissues (e.g., eggs vs muscle). She is a great addition to the lab, is an amazingly hard worker and bright student, and I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of her labor!
Also in the lab this summer has been Quinn Montgomery. Quinn is on the crew team, was in my Physical Oceanography course, and is a delight to be around. He does not have a particular project he is focusing on (he has other plans for his capstone research), but has been invaluable in the field!
Of course, there has also been some great stuff going on with the Bahía de los Angeles research this summer - more on that soon!
from left to right - Quinn, Yuri, and Alex