http://atguelph.uoguelph.ca/2011/10/research-aims-to-understand-plant-extinction/
It is finally official, Marina’s Vanier Award has been made public, and I can finally boast about it. 1 out of the top 167 PhD students across natural, social, and medical sciences at the Canadian level is very impressive. Congratulations, Marina.
Last November, Marina and Amanda went to Kobe’s school to givea hands-on demonstration of microbes. The science teacher who invited them then nominated their activity to the Let’s Talk Science CIHR-Synapse award, a national competition. And they were selected as one of the 4 best showcase activities! And in the accompanying picture, you can see Amanda, Marina in the background, and my son Kobe with the spiderman sweater. How cool is all that?
Amanda and Marina created a module to introduce Grade 1 kids to microbes for the programLet’s talk science. They picked a very challenging subject to introduce something we cannot see to 6 year-olds. However, they pulled it off very successfully using pictures, glow-in-the-dark powder and black lights, and a couple of microscope. I joined them for the final presentation (in my son’s class), and these are the pictures I took.
In September, Marina will join our lab. She will study spatial patterns and metacommunity dynamics in Carolinian forest understory plants, and Andrew MacDougall is her co-advisor (since obviously I know nothing about plants). Today we visited 2 forest fragments, just to get an idea on the spatial (and temporal) scales of heterogeneity, and to get an idea of the practical considerations that drive the development of a research program.
The first set of pictures are some overviews of the different landscapes.