Recent Lab News
September 5th, 2024: Carter completes overhaul of lab website.
August 28th, 2024: Ford presents a speed talk at the first Odum seminar of the academic year alongside Profs. Jill Anderson and John Drake.
August 16th, 2023: Carter Watson joins the lab.
January 6th, 2022: Chao accepts a faculty position at Lanzhou University.
August 17th, 2021: Ford returns to UGA after serving as a Program Officer in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation.
April 1st, 2019: Ford will serve as a Program Officer in the Ecosystems Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation.
July 6th, 2018: Elise defends her thesis.
May 6th, 2018: Alyson and Luke Graduate.
April 20th, 2018: Chao defends his dissertation.
April 12th, 2018: Chao's Nature Geoscience manuscript from the SCALER project is accepted.
March 24th, 2018: Chao publishes a paper, "Convergence in temperature sensitivity of soil respiration: evidence from the Tibetan alpine grasslands," in Soil Biology and Biochemistry.
March 6th-9th, 2018: Ford attends a LTER working group at NCEAS focusing on long-term SOM data.
October 1st, 2017: Chao advances to candidacy.
June 1st, 2017: Chao is offered a postdoc with Jim Bence at Michigan State to develop statistical methods for meta-analysis.
April 17th, 2017: Liz defends her master's thesis.
April 3rd-4th, 2017: Alyson and Luke present the results of their CURO projects at the CURO Symposium.
March 29th, 2017: Kyunjin defends her dissertation.
March 24th, 2017: Luke is offered a summer research position to work with Jill Anderson at RMBL.
March 10th, 2017: Alyson is awarded an Ambasador Scholarship and a UGA honors international scholarship to attend the Innsbruck Summer School in Austria.
Her paper is published in Frontiers in Microbiology shows that C availability influences the temperature response of microbial respiration rate, which is associated with different responses of C uptake affinity.
December 26th, 2016: Kyungjin's C availability paper is published.
December 6th, 2016: Alyson and Luke have their CURO projects funded.
November 28th, 2016: Chao defends his statistics M.S. thesis. Now he's M.S.2.
November 11th-12th, 2016: Chao and Ford attend a SCALER meeting at the Konza LTER.
October 26th, 2016: Luke Gamblin joins the lab.
May 13th, 2016: Doug and Katelyn graduate.
May 9th, 2016: Former postdoc Christopher Lehmeier has Biogeosciences manuscript accepted.
This paper uses an elegant experimental setup to quantify how mass specific respiration rate, carbon use efficiency (CUE) and C stable isotope fractionation vary with temperature for a ubiquitous soil microbe.
April 28th, 2016: Liz is awarded a summer internship in Quito from CI.
Liz will spend most of the summer in Ecuador helping to synthesize research on mangrove ecosystem services in an effort to identify critical konwledge gaps for effective conservation.
April 18th, 2016: Elise advances to candidacy.
April 12th, 2016: Chao's L&O Methods manuscript is accepted.
This paper shows how different methods for computing stream metabolism give rise to different estimates of GPP, ER, and of the underlying parameters of the functions for GPP and ER.
March 31st, 2016: Liz receives a Fullbright award to go to Costa Rica.
She will use the award to continue her studies of perceptions of Blue Carbon Community projects in different geographical regions with different land use histories.
January 16th, 2016: Alyson Wright joins the lab.
December 14th-18th, 2015: Chao and Ford Present at AGU.
December 11th, 2015: The lab goes ice skating!
November 6th-7th, 2015: Chao and Ford travel to KONZA for a SCALER synthesis meeting.
August 31st, 2015: Luquillo LTER proposal funded.
Ford and a future postdoc (please contact me if you're interested) will work with the Stream Team and climate modelers to develop models of trophic interactions and biogeochemical fluxes to predict the consequences of drought in tropical riparian ecosystems.
August 9th-14th, 2015: Elise, Chao, and Ford present at ESA in Baltimore.
July 7th-25th, 2015: Liz travels to Costa Rica to study perceptions of mangrove conservation.
June 5th, 2015: Liz receives funding from the MK Pentecost Ecology Fund.
She will use the award to fund work on the coast this summer aiming to quantify C accretion and green house gas loss in salt marshes.
June 1st-2nd, 2015: Elise attends the Elements, Genomes, and Ecosystems Conference in the UK.
She presented a poster describing how Daphnia predation on Chlamydomonas anatomy, physiology and nutrient cycling.
May 18th-22nd, 2015: Chao and Ford attend the annual SFS meeting.
Chao gave a talk about computational considerations for whole stream metabolism, and Ford gave a talk about the net influence of salmon on periphyton during spawning. No trip to Milwaukee is complete without a trip to Kopp's!
May 1st, 2015: Doug is accepted to the Coweeta RUE program.
April 23rd, 2015: Ford gives a talk at the Rubenstein School of the Environment at UVM.
April 10th, 2015: Elise wins Odum School Outstanding TA Award.
April 2nd, 2015: Elise passes her comprehensive exam.
March 26th, 2015: Middle schoolers from Houston County, GA visit the lab.
Science fair participants visit labs in the Odum School and in other departments on campus.
March 23rd, 2015: Liz is awarded a Tinker Foundation Travel Award.
She will use the award to conduct a pilot study on Blue Carbon Community projects in Costa Rica this summer.
January 26th, 2015: Katelyn Esters joins the lab.
October 8th-9th, 2014: Ford attends annual AERC meeting in Washington, DC.
September 18th, 2014: Coweeta SCALER is completed.
August 25th-29th, 2014: Former postdoc Jarad (Daryl) Mellard visits he lab.
August 1st, 2014: Liz completes field work on Jekyll Island.
July 20th-31st, 2014: Chao and Ford travel to Alaska for SCALER fieldwork.
May 19th-31st, 2014: Chao and Ford attend JASM in Portland, OR.
Chao gave a talk titled "Linking stream ecosystem rates across scales."
May 16th, 2014: Kyungjin's pH-enzyme activity paper is accepted by Soil Biology and Biochemistry.
Her paper, "Differential effects of pH on temperature sensitivity of organic carbon and nitrogen decay," extends previous work in the lab by quantifying the influence of pH on specific enzyme activities and C and N flow from SOM substrates. It will appear in Soil Biology and Biochemistry.
April 28th-May 2nd, 2014: Ford attends EGU in Vienna.
He co-convened a session focusing on SOM decomposition and presented two posters.
April 23rd, 2014: Chao and Liz are awarded Odum School small grants.
Chao will use his grant to study the effects of temperature and moisture availability on specific enzyme activities and respiration rates in soils. Liz will use her grant to study greenhouse gas flux in salt marshes along the Georgia Coast this summer.
April 5th-6th, 2014: Chao and Elise present at Southeast Biogeochemistry Symposium at Georgia Tech.
Chao's poster titled "Temperature sensitivity of recalcitrant SOM decomposition" described how warming influences temperature sensitivity of soil respiration. Elise's poster titled "Initial conditions affect ecosystem CO2 flux in an experimental system," demonstrated how temperature and resource availabilty influence CO2 flux in aquatic multitrophic microcosms.
April 4th, 2014: Doug Hart receives the Thelma Richardson and Frank Golley Undergraduate Support Award.
He will use the funds associated with the award to help fund his participation in the Tropical Ecology Program in Costa Rica in May.
March 25th, 2014: Kyungjin advances to candidacy.
January 22nd, 2014: Isaac Han joins the lab as a technician.
January 1st, 2014: NSF Grant awarded to study microbial DOC transformations.
Mary Ann Moran (PI), Patricia Medieros, Jon Amster, Barney Whitman and Ford (co-PIs) receive funding to study how particular genes are expressed by marine bacterioplankton to transform and metabolize complex DOC substrates.
December 24th, 2013: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and Jarad Mellard's eco-evo paper was accepted by Theoretical Ecology.
Former postdoc Jarad Mellard's paper showing how trait evolution in the context of a consumer-resource interaction does not lead to maximum ecosystem resilience was accepted by Theroretical Ecology.
December 10th, 2013: Ford gives a talk at AGU.
The talk, "Linking microbial exo-enzyme production to biomass stoichiometry, resource availability and soil respiration," showed how C and N allocation to different exoenzymes set limits for homeostatic C:N regulation in different SOM landscapes.
November 6th-10th, 2013: Ford and Chao travel to the Konza Prairie LTER to attend a SCALER meeting.
