UNH faculty honored as winter break begins

Check it out: UNH science faculty were recognized as being among the best researchers in the US!  It's especially nice to see the part at the bottom about how Dr. Serita Frey had the highest-cited paper.  Serita is also a fabulous professor (I took Soil Ecology with her this past semester) and I'm hoping to work with her during my future research here at UNH... It seems I'll be learning from the best!

As winter break begins, I want to take a moment to wish everyone a happy holiday.  I'll be celebrating Chanukah, Solstice, and Christmas (in that order) this year, so I have most of my seasonally-festive bases covered.  Otherwise, if you need to find me over break, look no further than my computer where I'll be reading as much as I can and working on my experiment (see my last post).  I'll also sink my teeth into Joshua Schimel's book, Writing Science: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded, which my advisor just gave me; it looks quite well-written (one should hope so!) and I'm looking forward to perusing its words of wisdom.

Oh, and did I mention I'm heading to Puerto Rico for a quick vacation?  This winter break is going to be epic!!

Nearing the end of my first semester...

The first semester in my Ph.D. program has been going great!  I'm just one final exam away from finishing my classes.  Most of my peers only take 1 or 2 classes per semester, but I wanted to start knocking credits off early--I have to complete 36 during my program--so I took 3 classes this time around.

1. Ethics in Research and Scholarship, which fulfilled a requirement of my program, as well as a college-wide requirement for Ph.D. students.  It's a complex topic, and this class covered some foundations in a broad range of ethical issues related to conducting research, many of which I had never considered before,
2.  Research Methodology & Statistics I, taught by an excellent prof from the Psychology department who really made the subject come alive.  Although I took a Stats class as an undergrad, it's through this class that I feel I'm really starting to understand it.
3. Soil Ecology, another great class taught by my (I hope) future committee member Serita Frey, all about the microbes and other organisms that live in the soil, their interactions, life strategies, and involvement in terrestrial--and global--ecological processes, including carbon and nitrogen cycling (my favorite!).

I'll be keeping busy over winter break setting up a greenhouse experiment I'd like to start as soon as possible.  If I heard him right, my advisor has given me the go-ahead to look into doing a metagenomic study as part of my experiment, which is an exciting and cutting-edge method of understanding which microbes are in the soil and what roles they're playing, which we can get at by determining what genes they carry and which ones they actively use.  I'm also scouring the scientific literature on the interactions between plant roots and soil microbes, and how these interactions affect soil nutrients, especially nitrogen.  If I can synthesize our existing knowledge about this topic in an interesting conceptual framework, I'll be able to write a nice review paper and try to get it published!

Next semester I'll be hitting the ground running with three more classes... Research Methodology & Statistics II (after which I'll be ready for some more complicated stuff... I'm thinking a Multivariate Stats class...), Microbial Ecology & Evolution (definitely looking forward to that), and my advisor Stuart's "hot topics" graduate seminar on soil carbon (should be really interesting, and I'm looking forward to taking a class with him).

Oh, and check it out: I put together a webpage for my lab!  It's pretty basic, but it gets the job done.  Visit the Soil Biogeochemistry & Fertility Lab and let me know what you think.