Meyer-Kaiser lab

I packed my scrubber, filled my bailout tank, and folded my drysuit. I was excited for the next day's SCUBA dive. "Wow," I thought to myself, "Why don't I do this more often?" Yours truly underwater at the City of Salisbury shipwreck. Photo by Greg  Lewandowski. Then my alarm went off at 4:30 am, and I remembered why.  There is not a SCUBA charter company on Cape Cod, so if you want to go diving in my corner of the world, you have three choices: walk into the local pond , drive to Boston, or drive to Gloucester. In the last week, I have done the latter two. With a truck full of gear, I have raced down empty highways at 5:00 in the morning to join a charter boat of like-minded ocean addicts. Early wake-up calls aside, I have enjoyed every second.  I'm training right now for a research expedition. No, I will not tell you where I'm going (yet), but feel free to guess! Let's just say there will be a lot of diving, and I'm super excited about the...

Friends, I reached a milestone this week. My fiftieth scientific paper has been published online.  Not only is the paper in question #50 on my publication record, but it is also a particularly significant work in my career. This paper summarizes everything that is known about hard-bottom communities in the deep Fram Strait. I first became captivated by dropstones and the diverse communities that live on them in 2011. That simple fascination led to a decade and a half of research , exploration , and discovery .  My own research trajectory has developed in a much broader context: the Long-Term Ecological Research observatory HAUSGARTEN . This one-of-a-kind deep Arctic observatory was launched in 1999, and HAUSGARTEN data have demonstrated long-term changes in the Arctic Ocean ever since. In honor of HAUSGARTEN's 25th anniversary, my colleagues at the Alfred Wegener Institute decided to publish a special volume of research papers. My contribution was accepted as part of the vol...

Friends, it is an exciting day when a project gets finished! Recently, several volunteers  have been cranking away on a labor-intensive lab project, and the process is now complete! I am very excited to see all their efforts result in a dataset.  The project is all about change in the Arctic Ocean. As you probably know, the polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the world ocean, but we have yet to grapple with what that means for biodiversity. In 2023, my graduate student, Kharis, and I decided to find out. She found an excellent scientific paper from the early 2000s about biodiversity of tiny animals living between sediment grains in a high Arctic fjord, Kongsfjorden. We were planning a sampling trip of our own to Kongsfjorden at the time, so Kharis suggested that we repeat the sampling design from that previous study. By comparing results, we could see how the Arctic environment has changed over two rapidly-warming decades.  Two of the bivalve species we...

Friends, as you know, I have a busy career. Actually, "chaotic" might be a better word than "busy" - there are always numerous projects, papers, proposals, and people to manage. I basically live in a hurricane.  A while ago, I wanted to make a poster for my lab walls that described the situation. Inspired by the movie "Everything, everywhere, all at once," I tried using generative AI to create a poster titled "Everything, underwater, all at once" with myself as the main character. It didn't work. I'm not sure how many of you have played with gen AI recently, but it is not particularly good at taking instructions like "draw the person in this photo exactly."  Enter my husband, Carl. He's the Vice President of Hardware for an AI company, and he knows his way around the state-of-the-art tools much better than I do. He didn't want to mimic a movie poster - he wanted to make me a brand-new logo for my lab.  In order for you t...