An Exciting Year Ahead

This week was a quiet week of research, but an exciting week to plan for an exciting upcoming year. So I thought I'd take the time to highlight the cool things that are happening next year.

I was accepted to speak at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024 in New Orleans. This conference is the flagship conference for the ocean sciences and for the broader ocean research and culture communities, and it brings together researchers from across the country to talk about latest ocean trends, new research findings, and to provide networking opportunities with government officials, universities, and non-governmental organizations. This conference is six full days of research talks, panel discussions, networking events, and community. I'm really excited for a number of talks that are offered this year, including conversations around equity and inclusion in ocean sciences and ocean science research and how to foster beneficial citizen science relationships with local communities. Additionally, some of my friends and colleagues are presenting their work, which I am excited to hear about. Interestingly, this conference has placed little emphasis on plastic pollution research, though that largely comes down to the willingness of scientists to host and plan the sessions. There are some other fun opportunities like K-12 science and undergraduate research presentations at the conference, so it will be a week of good fun.

Additionally, this year I will graduate after working five years on my dissertation research. At our last meeting my PhD committee voiced no concerns with my upcoming graduation plans, which means that now I will spend time wrapping up my final data analysis, writing the research into one cohesive narrative, and evaluating all the work I completed to make sense of the past five years at the macro scale. I am also lucky that my teaching responsibility for this next semester is less time-intensive than previous ones. I will be working with students on field marine ecology during weekly trips to the marine lab as a TA for one of our many experimental biology courses. These courses fulfill an oral presentation requirement established by the university to support job-ready skills for our students. Since this teaching responsibility requires less face-to-face contact than my previous ones, I can spend the additional time writing, evaluating, and summarizing my thoughts on what the past five years have meant. Additionally, knowing how I work, I will likely take on supporting roles at the lab to help other ongoing projects.

Finally, I'm excited for our bi-annual marine lab open house which will happen this April (04/20/2024). This open house is an opportunity for marine lab scientists, technicians, faculty, students, and staff to meet with the public to talk about our work, why we use the marine lab as our home base, what the Florida coastline can tell us about the world, and sometimes the open house can be an opportunity to recruit new support for the marine lab (new undergraduate assistants, lab technicians, or even graduate students). The meiolab uses this time to talk about how much we can learn from our tiny animals and how cool it is to study the small highways that exist below the sediment-water interface. If you happen to be in the area, we'd love to have you attend; it's FREE.