I have had some amazing opportunities to mentor students during my PhD and as a Postdoc. I love to see students grasp concepts through hands-on research and fieldwork and I continue to be inspired by their unique perspectives. Below are a few photos from some of my experiences mentoring and teaching students.
From 2021-2023, I had the fortune of mentoring Katie Ann Huy, an amazing young scientist who is now pursuing her PhD at Stanford. She worked with me to understand how the rhizosphere recovers after wildfire in chaparral environments. Katie helped analyze microbial and fungal DNA, extracellular enzyme activity, and the geochemistry of soils from burned and unburned soils over almost 2 years of sampling.
In 2022 I led one of the four projects investigated by graduate students during the International Geobiology Course hosted by Caltech. We took students sampling in the Eastern Sierras, helped them learn many ways to analyze the samples at Caltech, and then showed them how to process the data during a stay on Catalina Island, CA. Along with Victoria Orphan, I showed students how to investigate nitrogen cycling in micro-algae using stable isotope probing for the project I designed. Being part of this course for a second year was an incredible experience and this past December students presented the N cycling project at AGU.
In 2021 I was a lead TA for the International Geobiology Course hosted at Caltech. Organizing the course during pandemic times was challenging and limited many of the things we could do, but fortunately we had an amazing group of graduate students who would not be deterred!
In 2014, 2014, and 2018 I was the TA for Environmental Field Methods Capstone course at Georgia Tech. I led senior college students into the field, many for the very first time, and helped them plan and investigate individual semester-long projects based on the geochemistry, geophysics, or meteorology of a coastal environment.