This week was the ASU School of Life Sciences’ annual undergraduate research symposium. Last year, my first at ASU, I attended the event and was surprised by the limited amount of field ecological research being showcased. This year, thanks to a lot of dedicated mentoring effort by lab members Courtenay Ray and Dr. Luiza Aparecido, we were able to send six students and five ecology research projects to the symposium.

I’m proud of all the students’ hard work – the presentations were the culmination of months of effort, and represent waypoints along a journey to what will hopefully become student-led papers and undergraduate theses.

This week we are back to the lab – more chemistry to do, more soils to pick through, more data to analyze – and I am excited to see where all this work goes. We have a great team to do the work with.