On Thursday, April 28, the graduate students in the Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology PhD program held the first annual Graduate Student Symposium at the Marine Science Center. The event, aimed at giving students experience in both planning and presenting at a symposium, showcased the wide diversity of wonderful research being conducted by graduate students in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences.
Each graduate student gave a twelve-minute talk about their research followed by a question and answer period. Students also conducted peer reviews of all presentations, providing valuable feedback to their colleagues. Students, faculty, researchers, and Center staff enjoyed a full day of research presentations, with breakfast and lunch for all, sponsored by the Marine Science Center Graduate Student Association with funding provided by the Graduate Student Government.
Among the diverse topics discussed were interactions among green and blue crabs, olfactory sensing in robots, black sea bass range expansion, and bacterial resistance in termites. Top Speaker awards went to Sarah Donelan of the Trussell Lab and Michael Peters of the Detrich Lab. Donelan’s talk, Refuge quality impacts the strength of nonconsumptive effects on prey, focused on how the quality and availability of refuge areas for prey Dogwhelk impacts responses to predation risk from predatory Green Crabs. Peters’ talk, Expression and sequence divergence between transcriptomes of two Antarctic notothenioid ecotypes, focused on his research on Antarctic ice fish, which are the only vertebrates that lack red blood cells normally used for oxygen transport. Honorable mentions were also awarded to Ashley Bulseco-McKim of the Bowen Lab, Chris Conroy of the Grabowski Lab, and Kate McClure of the Trussell lab.
The event provided an important opportunity to students to gain feedback on theoretical and logistical problems they’d been struggling with in their work. Many talks spurred suggestions and discussion both during and after the symposium. Several students and faculty commented on the great opportunity to discover what colleagues are working on, and paved the way for further peer-to-peer feedback and collaboration.
Graduate students, with the support of Associate Professor Jonathan Grabowski and Center staff David Dawson and Sonya Simpson, planned and executed the entire event. Special thanks to graduate students Chris Baillie, Sara Schaal, Amanda Dwyer, Forest Schenck, Tanya Rogers, Althea Moore, and Jessica Torossian for their instrumental roles in making the event a success. The event showcased how graduate research in the department is deeply interdisciplinary, and focused on a wide range of species, ecosystems, and topics from genetics and ecology, to robotics.
