Soil Microbial Ecology and Biogeochemistry
Moss on a leash. Time-lapse video of a bowl of fruit rotting. Larger-than-life worms squirming on a giant screen. I saw all of these at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago as part of their current exhibit, Rooted in Soil (runs until April 26). Their timing is particularly apt, since 2015 is the International Year of Soils. …
I’m really excited to be running a booth at the California Academy of Sciences Nightlife tomorrow night. The theme is “Micro“, and we’re gonna have soil fauna extractions, nematodes, protists, and bacterial cultures, all from the soil. People can look at the little cuties under the microscope and learn about soil diversity, while exploring the …
My third Ph.D. dissertation chapter has been published in Environmental Science and Technology. I am feeling pretty proud, and am happy to be getting the work I did at Cornell off my desk (two more papers to go, with the one on three-source partitioning with two stable isotopes almost ready to submit). I presented this work at …
The SSSA (and CSSA and ASA) annual meeting last week in Long Beach, CA, was awesome! Soil science, and particularly soil ecology, inhabits kind of a weird space, where it is spread across a lot of potentially relevant major meetings (there are substantial soils contingents at the AGU and ESA meetings, not to mention the Soil Ecology …
This summer, I accepted a tenure-track faculty position as a soil ecologist at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect as I entered the job market, but found lots of helpful resources online. In particular, various posts and resources from Inside Higher Ed, Prof-Like Substance, Female Science Professor, the Chronicle of …
I have exciting news about my future: I can officially announce that I will be starting a postdoc in Mary Firestone‘s lab at the University of California-Berkeley this September, after which I will become a tenure-track assistant professor of soil ecology in the Department of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2016! I am so excited …
As of last week, I am now officially, completely, 100% Doctor Thea Whitman. To celebrate, I’ve made a wordle of my entire dissertation, so you can see what it is all about!
We got out to my field trial site out at Mt. Pleasant a couple of weeks ago to re-establish the plots, and to sample them for our visiting student, Romy’s research. She’ll be asking some very interesting questions about biochar’s interactions with soil aggregation after a year of being in the soil, using a whole …
[I tried to post this June 6, but it wouldn’t save properly then – I’m just putting it up now.] The official announcement of Cornell’s new School of Integrative Plant Science was today[June 6]. It’s been a major issue on my mind this past year, particularly the concern that its creation marks a clear step …