Welcome to new ShadeLab members, and best wishes to our graduates!

ShadeLab has had a lot of happy transitions recently!

We weclome Dr. Samuel Barnett as a new post-doctoral scholar to work on the Centralia microbial ecology project. Sam's research will investigate the resilience of soil microbiomes to extreme disturbances, with a focus on responses of traits and functions He comes to ShadeLab from Dan Buckley's lab at Cornell, where he received his PhD last spring.

We also welcome new FAST Fellow Emily Greeson. Emily is a Ph.D. student in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Department in the Contag Lab, and she joins ShadeLab as a teaching-as-research fellow. She will be working with Ashley's MMG 425 Microbial Ecology Class to understand how intentional team forming can support student collaborative learning.

We also welcome new undergraduate researcher Aspen Johnson. Aspen will be working with ShadeLab post-doc Marco Mechan Llontop on a Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center project to understand the soghum microbiome in mucilage and wax compartments.

At the same time, we say aurevior and best wishes to prior undergrad researcher Emily Ruda. Emily has graduated from MSU in Spring 2021, and continued as an undergraduate assistant in summer 2021. She worked with Sreejata Bandopadhyay on understanding how environmental bacteria respond to plant stress signals. We miss her and wish her well!