Seminar Preparations

This week, in a rare week off from active research, I have spent most of my time preparing for an upcoming seminar I will give to the ecology and evolution side of our biology department. The departmental seminar is one of the final requirements for PhD candidates and comes between a few months and a full year before the dissertation defense. This seminar is a good opportunity to talk about our work as PhD candidates in front of a more heterogeneous audience than we see at conferences [usually], and allows us to field sometimes difficult and specific questions about our methods and results.

For me, I am going to be presenting the first two chapters of my dissertation at this seminar talk, largely because I have a lot of parts of my dissertation and these first two chapters are inherently linked. These two chapters--the first on the seasonal and spatial variations in MPs in the St. Andrew Bay system and the second on the spatial variations in nematode communities within the system--represent some ideas that we don't hear about much in our departmental seminars. While my work is not necessarily environmental science or fully ecotoxicology, it exists in a complex Venn diagram of multiple fields of science. I am really excited to share my work with my friends and the faculty who have supported me for so many years, and this week's picture is a [low quality] snapshot of a single piece of the narrative. I'm embarrassed to say that rotating the x-axis tick mark labels took much longer than it should have.

Next week I am scheduled to get some fluorescence imaging work done with my nematodes. While I did this work previously, I now know which individuals have microplastics in their guts and I hope to use higher powered magnification to more quickly count the individual beads that the nematodes have eaten.

​Stay tuned!

---