Antarctic Research

Prior to graduate school at the University of Michigan I worked in the ​Marine Science department at the University of Georgia. I studied the bacterial community structure in and around Antarctic Polynyas. I was particularly interested in understanding which bacterial classes were dominant at different depths in the water column and the surrounding sea ice and whether or not they were 'active'. While I did filter mass quantities of water for eventual 454 sequencing, most of my time was spent filtering smaller quantities of water to examine the bacterial activity (metabolism) at each depth and location using MAR-CARD-FISH. Parts of this work have been published across two PNAS papers (see below), and I am committed to publish a manuscript focused on the work my advisor and I performed over the course of two research cruises across the Southern Ocean.  
Picture
All crew and scientists aboard the Oden 2007-2008, the only people I interacted with for 50+ days.
Most of the work I did in Antarctica during my first research cruise was collated into a large biogeographical study on bacterial diversity from the Arctic to the Antarctic, looking at both shallow and deep water samples. This work was very exciting, because we believe that environmental conditions drive the differences in bacterial community structure from pole-to-pole. 

This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October of 2012, titled Pole-to-pole biogeography of surface and deep marine bacterial communities.
Picture
Minke whale alongside our ship in the Southern Ocean
Picture
Penguin water exit with style
I also collected and analyzed water samples for a colleague in Sweden, Laura Alonso-Sáez, for a study on archaea.  I fed small samples of ocean water from depths ranging from 1m to 1500m various concentrations of radio-labeled leucine and bicarbonate for MAR-CARD-FISH processing.

This work was also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October of 2012, titled Role for urea in nitrification by polar marine Archaea.