I have wanted to dance my PhD ever since I heard about the Dance Your PhD contest as an undergraduate student. Luckily, I found an amazing collaborator in the dance department at CU and together we are working on a proposal to NEST for summer funding to research, collaborate, and create a public-facing exhibition. During my experience of Queer Studies at the University of Wyoming, I fell in love with writer and disability activist, Eli Clare, who connects environmental science and disability studies. My dance collaborator has interest in the connections between disability and dance. So together, we are dreaming up a project that weaves disability studies with landscape degradation and restoration science. We are taking an embodied research approach, and plan to learn together through traditional scholarly study as well as through movement.
More to come about this project in the months ahead!
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My first experience of lab meetings was incredibly intimidating. I would spend hours trying to read through the discussion paper ahead of time and would find myself completely unable to participate in the group conversation about the paper when the time came. I felt insecure and inadequate. I had no idea which of my thoughts were due to my newness to science and which were legitimate discussion points, so I kept my mouth shut. And in doing so, I severely limited my learning and growing as a scientist during that time, allowing my emotions to overwhelm my entire experience of the lab meeting.
I have since learned that this negative experience may have been due to the style of the lab meeting and the expectations for conversation more so than my own inadequacies as a novice learner. I was first introduced to the practice of collaborative communication through my mentors at the University of Wyoming. Collaborative communication is a dialogue practice that aims for equity in conversation via strategies for listening and thoughtful communication. It is a complex practice, and I am still just learning. My collaborators at the University of Wyoming are working on applying a practice of collaborative communication in lab group meetings. I feel incredibly honored to be learning from them through a qualitative research project for which I am analyzing transcript data. This experience is again helping me to learn a wide range of R skills and ways of turning complex human thought/speech/dialogue into visualizations. I will include manuscript information here once it is available. I have been working with Tristan Caro on a second microbial lipid turnover project. This time we are working with permafrost soils. Tristan has completed several isotope incubations for these soils at different temperatures, and together we have extracted total DNA. Our next step will be 16S rRNA marker gene sequencing and bioinformatics to compare microbial community assembly over time for the permafrost soils under different temperatures. We are taking a climate change lens and trying to understand microbial community composition and function following thaw due to increasing temperatures.
I will post manuscript details here when they become available. |
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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