Meyer-Kaiser lab

Man, it was a fun day it the lab yesterday. Kharis, Sarah, and I spent the whole morning working on a project together, and we managed to make great progress.  Recently, Kharis has been struggling to identify larvae from the Arctic. Don't get me wrong - we have a good methodology , thanks to a few years of struggling and about 6 months of Johanna troubleshooting. We can reliably get good-quality sequences from our specimens now. The DNA was not the problem (for once). Kharis's struggle has been morphology. She sorted all her larvae into categories based on how they looked in the field. It's a strategy I taught her - sort everything live, photograph and preserve the specimens, then sequence them back in the lab. By sorting up-front, you can save yourself a lot of time and just sequence a few representatives of each morphotype once you're home. If the sequences for those representatives line up, you have a reliable identification for the morphotype.  If.  See, that'

Hollis joined the lab through his school's  mentorship program.  Friends, I want to tell you about something magical that's happening in our lab right now. As you know, I am passionate about mentoring the next generation of scientists. It's why I've taken on a PhD student, a postdoc, and two summer undergraduates at WHOI. If my lab was at a standard university with all sorts of students running around, I would be the professor who proudly offered research opportunities to anyone who wanted the experience. Woods Hole is decidedly short on undergrads, but what we do have are high school students hungry for a chance.  One student is doing his science fair project under my lab's mentorship for the second year in a row. Two students who did internships with us last year asked if they could come back to keep learning. I also recently signed up for the mentorship program through a high school on Martha's Vineyard and got a fantastic new lab member . Just this week, tw