In April, immediately following my PhD defense, I attended Biocrust5 in Chihuahua, Mexico with ~50 biocrust nerds from around the world. This was an incredible experience which I would not have had without the financial support of the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Program at CU Boulder and the CU Boulder Graduate School. We had 4 days of presentations, all about biocrust. Each evening, we visited museums and art galleries. At the end of the week, we took a field trip to Peguis Canyon and observed the biocrust (and the canyon too). The field trip was the best part of the week - faces pinned to the ground, excited squeals at the site of a familiar lichen or plant friend.
It was remarkable that Matt Bowker and Anita Antoninka were able to bring so many students to this international conference. Some of their students presented scientific posters or talks for the first time. I was also amazed at the effort by the conference organizers (Elisabeth and Victor) to include art in the program. Not only did we experience local ceramics and art, but we had an art competition. Entries included poetry, 3D art, dance, radio play, and videos. This conference had gone many years without convening due to COVID, and it felt like everyone had done incredible work within biocrust research and biocrust outreach. This was one of my most favorite conferences I have ever been to. I loved traveling abroad (I haven't been abroad in quite some time), I loved viewing the solar eclipse with other scientists, I loved meeting biocrust researchers from all over the world. Most importantly, I loved the friendliness and camaraderie of this community. It felt like a family that I am just starting to get to know. One that could last a lifetime.
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As the other PhD students in my department prep their field gear and assemble field crews, I am feeling a little shocked that my summer will consist of no field work and no lab work. My job has become incredibly straight forward with my only task being to write. I have had many opportunities to work in the field and in the lab the past 4 years and it is now time to synthesize all of that information, time, money, effort into cohesive written units. I am reading and thinking a lot about scientific writing right now including: ways to schedule writing blocks; making my writing clear, concise, and accessible; developing a narrative from a scientific study; working with co-authors on all the stages of a manuscript; and the peer review process. All of the PhD students before me have been able to get through this step and so will I.
As all of this writing happens, I am still trying to get outside and play. There are Stroke & Strides to complete, 14ers to hike, and many miles of Boulder trails that I have not yet explored. Often I find myself writing (in my head) during these long excursions outside, where I can get away from the mundane repetition of real words being typed onto the computer and move toward high level overview writing - the kind that has to happen for a clear story to develop. The final part of my PhD dissertation will be a biocrust restoration meta-analysis which was started with a Powell Center working group many years ago. I have been reading tutorials and papers about meta-analysis generally, to get a sense for the methods I will be learning/employing. I have two awesome students working with me this summer to curate the biocrust database that was started by the working group. We will be checking the data together and then starting some analyses in R.
Meta-analysis is a powerful technique of quantitatively drawing together many separate scientific works to synthesize information. I did not know that I would be working on meta-analysis when I started my PhD, but I have now seen that many PhD students incorporate meta-analysis into one of their dissertation chapters as a way of broadening beyond their single experimental studies and contributing to their field in a more synthetic way. I think that it will be useful to learn, but also a huge challenge for me in the coming months. The spring semester came and went. I was a teaching assistant for the Microbiology lecture which included grading weekly in-class assignments and holding office hours for students to ask questions. I did not take any courses and my primary goal was to make significant progress on two manuscripts for my dissertation work. I was able to get one submitted to a journal and went through the peer review process for the first time. I am still in the midst of peer review. The second paper is now in outline form, and I am looking forward to submitting it for peer review in a scientific journal by mid-summer.
I am now 1 year away from the end of my PhD. I am feeling ready to wrap up all of these biological soil crust projects and to continue working with my amazing collaborators along the way to the finish line. I already have an exit talk date (April 2024). Postdoc announcements and job advertisements are starting to catch my eye. This spring there were some interesting options - a teaching position at Western State and a field station manager in the Tetons. As I move steadily to May 2024, I will be thinking about how I want to spend my final year in the Front Range (May 2024-May 2025) and what may be coming after that. Everywhere I look there is interesting work to be done and fabulous people to do that work with. Now I need to decide where I am needed most. 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! 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. In the winter (2021-2022), an intense fire broke out near the Marshall Mesa area of Boulder and spread downwind toward the cities of Superior and Louisville. It was the most destructive fire in Colorado history, damaging entire neighborhoods. The fire had spread quickly through the grassy plains of Boulder County, pushed by wind over 100 mph. I heard of the fire while spending time with family in New York state. We watched news reels of the flames and evacuation orders. It was the first fire I had "experienced" close to an urban center, and I wondered how it could be different from the more typical wildland fires of the West.
Dr. Noah Fierer and Dr. Eve Hinckley were kind enough to bring me on their project to quantify soil contamination by heavy metals within a few months after the Marshall fire, but before reconstruction at damaged sites. So, during the months of April and May, Cliff Adamchak and I lead the sampling campaign in both burned and unburned neighborhoods. And then the 250 samples were sent to a lab at CSU for processing. More details to come, but you can follow progress on this project here. The published manuscript for this project can be found here. |
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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