This summer we are hosting our first-ever remote research program for undergraduate students and K-12 teachers. We had been planning to bring several people to Ghana for tropical forest plant ecology fieldwork – and when that became impossible, to instead host them at our lab in Berkeley for the summer. Unfortunately the world has not allowed us to do either, so we are instead re-focusing our work away from field work and lab work towards computational analyses. While the situation is not ideal, it has been a nice opportunity to delve into some modeling components of our grant.

Our team includes two Berkeley students, Hailey and LeeDar, as well as two NSF-funded participants from other institutions. You can read their biographies on the lab website.

The first is Caroline Pechuzal, a biology teacher working at a high school in Tucson, Arizona, whose work is supported by the Research Experience for Teachers program.

The second is Orlando Rios Cortes, an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, supported by the Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

They are both joining us each week over a video link. We just kicked off the summer in early June, and are on our way to some exciting science. We’re all learning together how to make a remote internship work – finding ways to connect informally, to put mentoring structures in place, to provide informal feedback, to teach new skills. I’m proud that we are able to offer a program in the midst of so much upheaval, and hope the outcomes will be positive for everyone.