2019 was another busy year, with lots of milestones. Nayela Zeba and Jaimie West are now officially Ph.D. candidates, having passed their qualifying exams and completed all their coursework – congratulations to both! We have two new lab members: Dr. Jacob Price and Dana Johnson. Jacob is working on improving our representation of uncertainty in microbial community data, in a collaboration with Dr. Amy Willis and Dr. Karl Broman. Dana is starting her MS in our lab, working on deciphering microbial response to wildfires, in a collaboration with our colleagues at the Canadian Forest Service in Edmonton, AB, and the Forest Products Lab here in Madison. Congratulations are also an order to Jamie Woolet, who had her first first author paper accepted this fall – a review/meta-analysis of the effects of PyOM on microbial community composition. Congratulations also to former lab member Christina Kranz, who is now pursuing her PhD at NC State, whose two MS papers have now been published in Applied Soil Ecology and the Soil Science Society of America Journal. Lab members have also been busy at conferences, with Tim presenting at the AGU and Mike, Nayela, and Jaimie presenting at the SSSA last winter, Jaimie at the Soil Ecology Society in May, Mike again at the SSSA this fall, and Jamie at the Association for Fire Ecology this fall. Finally, we had some very exciting news that our collaborative proposal to the DOE with UC Berkeley and the JGI was funded this summer, which will allow us to do some exciting research on PyOM-responsive microbes, and introducing some nitrogen isotopes into the mix.

Another fall adventure at Sutter’s Ridge for apple picking

Tim and Jaimie at our lab’s WI Science Festival table