Meyer-Kaiser lab

Any comic book or graphic novel fans out there? This post is for you!  A while ago, I was contacted by an MIT professor teaching a class: CMS 306 Making Comics and Sequential Art. In that class, students learn to draw and narrate stories using sequential panels, much like a comic book. A classic assignment is for students to team up with a scientist and tell the story of their research.  Now, I love a good science-art collaboration. I see metaphors for research in modern art museums, and I find my scientific experiences reflected in music , dance , and drawing . When I saw the professor's email, I jumped enthusiastically on board.  There were actually two teams of students who chose my work. One created a comic about larval dispersal to shipwrecks, and the other team focused on how shipwreck materials impact recruitment. The recruitment team used a resurrected ship captain as their narrator, which was a really cool twist! The final, colorized version of their comic appe...

Co-hosts Kharis Schrage and Jane Weinstock introducing the  Larval Biology Symposium in Woods Hole.  When I walked into the auditorium, I immediately spotted a familiar face. Then another. Then another. The room was full of researchers I knew and admired. I could hardly decide who to greet first.  Every good scientific conference feels like a family reunion , and the Larval Biology Symposium was the best reunion of them all. A Larval Biology Symposium had not been organized for four years. In fact, the society behind it had largely gone dormant, to the detriment of research collaborations worldwide. Two WHOI graduate students - including my former student, Kharis - decided to resurrect the conference, hosting the first reincarnation right here in Woods Hole. There was extreme enthusiasm across the marine research community, and this year's Larval Biology Symposium attracted about 100 researchers from across North America, Europe, and Asia.  The scientific presentatio...

Friends, one of the most gratifying parts of my job is cheering on my colleagues as they accomplish great things. Over the past few weeks, I have had two opportunities to do that.  The archaeologist on my team, Calvin Mires, was selected as the National Lecturer for 2026 by the Archaeological Institute of America. It's a huge honor. Only one individual is selected each year, and that person is invited to deliver seminars at AIA chapters across the country. Calvin traveled to the College of William and Mary for his first address, which took place just two weeks ago. It was a resounding success. Calvin reported that the lecture hall was so fall, late arrivals were left to stand in the aisles. A grateful audience member even gifted Calvin a few books.  I am excited for Calvin, not just for the honor he clearly deserves, but for the opportunity that his speaking tour represents. He is developing a reputation for excellence in the archaeological community. Every time he shares his...

The end of summer this year felt like the end of a roller coaster. I had been speeding along at who-knows-how-many miles per hour, banking around tight curves , turning upside-down , enjoying  the thrills  with my hands in the air, but then all of a sudden, it came to a stop. The coaster car entered a dark tunnel, screeched to a halt, and I found myself disembarking before even registering that the season was over. Oof.  The last major event of my summer came in the final week of August. The team for my Marine Debris project marked a major milestone by deploying our robot, ResQ, in the ocean. ResQ was designed by my collaborator, Robin Littlefield, and his team of engineers, specifically to recover derelict fishing gear or other equipment lost at sea. The vehicle's design was inspired by a leatherback sea turtle, to make ResQ as sleek and immune to entanglements as possible. After two years of work, ResQ was ready for her first in-field demonstration, so we gathered on a...

My husband, Carl, walked into Redfield Auditorium. He had told me he was coming, but it felt surprising all the same. Carl hadn't set foot in a WHOI building in years. Yet here he was, showing up in the middle of the day to support me.  The lights dimmed, and I launched into my practiced speech: 45 minutes of scientific storytelling. I shared my memory from 2018, when a PhD student's seminar in that exact same auditorium sparked my interest in coral larvae. I explained how I formed a collaborative team to undertake research in Palau. I walked the audience through our questions , our approaches to answering them, and the curve-balls that hit us along the way. My story was told in data, but it was also deeply human - behind every discovery was a collaboration, a team , even a family.  While studying coral communities , we became a community ourselves.  When I finished speaking, my body relaxed. I exhaled deeply. With my pre-practiced script at an end, I answered free-fo...

Friends, I'm happy to announce that another Meyer-Kaiser lab paper is out today! My postdoc, Johanna Weston, spent her time at WHOI developing a plankton sampler that could go to full ocean depth without breaking the bank. Her vision was to enable hadal research worldwide, including countries without huge financial resources to dedicate to science. Her sampler, DeepZoo, got its first deployments locally before moving onto the East Pacific Rise and eventually Argentina. The results of Johanna's efforts have appeared today in a published paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution . You can read it here:  https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70392

Early morning low tide at the jetty Sometimes on this blog, I use the titles of my posts as a motif: a series of posts with similar titles will tell a cohesive story or use a unifying metaphor. My last post was "Waking up," and this installment is "Early morning." The two posts must be related, right? Nope, I've just been getting up at the crack of dawn. No metaphor needed - this time, the title is literal.  August is anemone spawning season. My early-morning routine started last Friday, when I went to the Cape Cod Jetty in Sandwich, MA for the 6:30 am low tide. Metridium senile lives in the protected spaces between rocks in the low intertidal, so I got up close and personal with the jetty. I crouched with my feet in the water, my knees in algae, and my hand tucked under a boulder as I scraped slimy creatures off the stone with my finger nails. More than once, I could feel a fisherman's eyes on me in a mix of confusion and judgment. After only half an hour,...