Nuwanthi Samarasinghe and Niall McGinty with help of much of the rest of the lab have started sampling the spring bloom plankton in the Bedford Basin.

Take a look at some of the plankton community contributing to this year’s bloom (images taken by Laura Bretherton and Ruby Hu).

Laura Bretherton, Niall McGinty, and Kevan Merrow participated in the Simons Foundation-funded Gradients 5 cruise as part of the SCOPE research program.

During 28 days at sea, Laura, Niall and Kevan collected dozens of samples of phytoplankton and zooplankton communities for analysis back in the lab. When all the processing is done, we will have much better knowledge of elemental (C, N, P) and macromolecular content and ratios for these communties across a gradient that spans …

Nuwanthi Samarasinghe recently participated in the 3MT (three-minute thesis) event at Dalhousie. Graduate students distilled the background, goals, and findings of their research into a three minute presentation with one slide targetted at a general audience. Students first competed in heats and Nuwanthi was one of eleven students selected for the final competition held this week at Dalhousie.

Congratulations to Nuwanthi for her presentation titled: “Do Small Diatoms …

Our research lab moved to Dalhousie in 2018. After much planning, packing, and unpacking we opened the new wet lab on November 29, 2018.

To mark this milestone, our lab manager, Ruby Hu assembled a short video documenting the process: youtube video

The first Simons CBIOMES workshop on Bayesian methods in plankton modeling was held on January 8-10, 2020, at the Samberg Conference Center on th MIT campus. Twenty eight participants represented all 10 of the CBIOMES Investigator labs. The workshop combined introductory lectures, instruction in use of the “Stan” software toolkit, and focused ‘hackathon’ time where participants tackled targeted problems from their research using Bayesian statistical methodology. …