UMBS Winter Research Meeting

February 21 and 22 brought about the third annual winter research meeting for the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) hosted at the Michigan League. These meetings were created as a way for all the researchers working at the UMBS to meet others, learn about different research projects and to form new collaborations, sometimes between people who would normally not have anything in common. 
The meeting began with an introduction by the director of the station, and was followed by a hand drawn poster session. One of the biggest challenges in science is finding a way to easily and clearly communicate the research you are doing. The people in charge of the UMBS think that one way to make your research simple is to hand draw a poster in under an hour. Then over the course of the conference, people would read over the basic idea of your project on your poster and if they see something interesting, they can approach you to discuss it. This often leads to new projects and advancements in the current one.
Our current project at the UMBS is: Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Greenhouse Gases and Atmospheric Particles in Northern Michigan, and is funded by MCubed, a program that takes three professors from different departments and has them all work together. Our team includes Dr. Andy Ault from environmental health sciences (EHS), Dr. Kerri Pratt from chemistry, and Dr. Eric Kort from atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences (AOSS). Each professor brought one student/post-doc with them to the conference: Daniel Gardner (Ault), Nate May (Pratt), and Dr. Mackenzie Smith (Kort). While the three professors mingled with the other researchers, the students and post-doc took to the paper and made an artistic masterpiece.

Dr. Mackenzie Smith showing off our work of art.

After the poster session, there was a series of presentations, from a wide variety of research fields, ranging from the reproductive cycles of microscopic organisms to harvesting invasive plant life for conversion to biofuel. Once the talks were done, everyone got together and discussed potential projects for the future and who wanted to be involved in each. The big overarching project for the future was to do burn plots: highly control fires designed to burn down small sections of the forest to measure how it affects the air, soil, water, and nearby plant life, as well as to measure all aspects of the regrowth.
The group of three professors - Andy, Kerri and Eric - were the only atmospheric researchers there - the rest were mostly biologists - and several of them were interested in potential collaborations.
Overall, we learned a great deal about the biological station, the people that worked there, and the wide range of projects that can be done in the future!