We have been doing lots of lab celebrations lately, as evident by champagne and brownies at lab meetings!

1) This spring, Jon received the 2017 Virginia Tech College of Science Outstanding PhD student of the year! He and new postdoc Kait Farrell have a very nice GLEON Fellowship Program paper on increasing salt concentrations in lakes in PNAS that can be found here, too!

2) In addition, lab alum Kate Hamre received the William Preston Society Thesis Award for best master’s thesis of all of VT in STEM! (this is the lab’s 2nd time receiving this award- lab alum Alex Gerling received this same award the preceding year!) Kate’s first lead-author paper from her MS is now out in press here at Journal of Plankton Research, which provides the first quantitative evidence that phytoplankton dynamics in downstream areas in reservoirs respond to different environmental forcing than upstream areas, which has important implications for algal management in drinking water reservoirs.

3) Jon’s first chapter is out in press here in Inland Waters too! His study provides the first continental analysis of reservoirs vs. naturally-formed lakes in the US and demonstrates that natural lakes and reservoirs have inherent water quality differences, separate from latitude. Interestingly, reservoirs have much higher water quality than natural lakes, especially in the southern U.S.

4) Ryan recently received the graduate Leo Bourassa Scholarship from the Virginia Lakes and Watershed Association and Kylie received the undergraduate Scholarship! (This is the 3rd year in the row for this award: Alex, then Jon, and now Ryan & Kylie are VLWA all-stars!)

5) Kylie received an Honorable Mention for the Goldwater Scholarship, Mary received the Honorable Mention for the NSF GFRP, and Nicole was chosen to be part of the SESYNC graduate workshop cohort for this year!

6)  Arianna has just received a prestigious Hollings Fellowship from NOAA. Only ~120 college sophomores in the US are awarded these each year, which provide tuition for two years and research $ for Arianna to work at a NOAA lab in summer 2018. Woot!

7) Joe and Ryan have finished building all of the ebullition traps for this summer, Mary has officially counted her first phytoplankton samples, Nicole has a Sunapee GLM sim up and running from 1981-2015, Arianna has done some major troubleshooting for the GRAPLEr software (which has a new wiki in the works!), Dexter is the pH probe calibrator extraordinaire, and Joe has accepted a MS graduate position at VCU in Paul Bukaveckas’ lab to start this summer!

8) Kait rocked her talk at SFS in Raleigh, which examined consumer effects across several SCALER streams as part of her PhD (see: http://kaitlinjfarrell.weebly.com for more on this research!)

8) We’ve gotten two very exciting notifications about NSF proposals being recommended… more news to come on this soon!

On top of all of this, we received some very nice coverage in both the campus-wide VT news and the local evening news on TV, highlighting our partnership with the WVWA. Yay!