It's Been a While

I wrote my most recent blog approximately three months ago, not knowing how I would incorporate my future job or career into my website and consistent blog posting. Well, I am happy to have accepted a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. Kim de Mutsert. I started my position yesterday (officially) and I will be working on two major projects during my three-year position. The broad theme of this postdoctoral position is using ecological modeling and quantitative ecology to evaluate how anthropogenic and environmental factors affect the health and wellbeing of marine organisms in the Gulf of Mexico. 

For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you will recognize that very few of the items from the last sentence are related to my research experiences at FSU. I'm a pollution ecologist, focusing on how microplastics alter ecosystem functions, and I used marine meiofauna as study organisms throughout my dissertation. However, I initially planned on including a modeling chapter in my dissertation that fell through the cracks when I needed to downsize my idea. I'll focus more on ecological modeling in a future blog, but I am so happy to work on projects surrounding modeling and I am thrilled to gain new skills in the field of quantitative ecology, as I hope to incorporate ecological modeling and network analysis into my future academic career.

I plan to continue to post regular, weekly updates to the blog (on Thursdays), though these updates may be more truncated than my posts during my PhD. I want to use the blog during this postdoc position to explain some of the technical aspects of ecological modeling and environmental management, so I hope to write a few paragraphs weekly that demystify the mathematics involved in making important management decisions. Until next week, I will leave you with the University of Southern Mississippi saying/battlecry: SMTTT!