It’s been a busy year! We had our first student graduate (congrats, Christina!), created a small-grants program in soil and environmental microbiology and awarded the first eight grants, welcomed new lab members Jaimie West (Ph.D. program) and Annie Edwards (undergraduate student in Soil Science), brought in new funding for some exciting projects, and, of course, did lots of research.

Mike dug many soil pits across the state this summer, collecting soils for his research on soil pH and was awarded a FEMS Early Career Scientist Grant to present his research on in situ soil pH at the Ecology of Soil Microorganisms in Helsinki, Finland! Nayela, Tim, Jamie, MZ, and Harry Read have been making great progress on the DOE-funded pyrophilous micro-organisms grant, including making our first PyOM in the charcoalator (thanks to Akio Enders at Cornell), developing the multiplexer for automatically sampling gas fluxes from many different jars, isolating lots of putative PyOM-degraders, and growing our first pine seedlings in the 13CO2 labelling chamber! That aspect of the lab’s research was covered in this really lovely article by Erik Ness for Grow magazine.

We also had a fun lab outing to pick apples up at Sutter’s Ridge Farm this fall.

Many of us will be heading off to the SSSA or AGU conferences this winter – hope to see you there!

Lab apple picking outing, featuring awesome gourds!

Tim in the background of the multiplexer wiring (Michael King, CALS)

Nayela and Thea opening the labelling growth chamber (Michael King, CALS)