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Sarah Roley Lab Site sarah.roley

Welcome to Carmella!

Dr. Carmella Vizza recently started in the lab as a postdoc on the E-fix (episodic N fixation) project. Before joining the lab, she received her B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Tulane University in 2008 where her honors thesis was about spider sperm competition. Next, she worked as a project manager for four years at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA Fisheries) based in Seattle, WA, examining the effect of marine-derived nutrients brought by Chinook salmon to riparian ecosystems. In 2018, she received her PhD at the University of Notre Dame in the field of aquatic biogeochemistry with the guidance of advisors Drs. Gary Lamberti and Stuart Jones. Her dissertation investigated how physicochemical properties and microbial communities shape ecosystem function in Alaskan wetlands.

Carmella is passionate about biogeochemistry and microbial communities, and looks forward to expanding these interests during her postdoctoral research. She will be shifting her focus to associative nitrogen fixation in switchgrass and is already hard at work, installing switchgrass mesocosms in Michigan!

Welcome to Aaron and Erica!

Aaron Pelly and Erica Bakker will both be pursuing M.S. degrees in Environmental Science, starting in Fall 2018. Aaron comes to the lab with a B.S. in Environmental Science from WSU Tri-Cities and after completing a SULI internship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Marine Sciences Lab in Sequim, WA. He is interested in aquatic ecology, especially in research that contributes to tackling the ecological problems facing our world. Erica taught high school science and math in Washington and Oregon for several years and is excited to embark on a new phase of her career.

New nitrogen fixation project!

Phil Robertson, Dan Buckley, and I have received NSF funding to work on associative nitrogen fixation in perennial grasses! We will be using isotopic tracers to determine when nitrogen fixation occurs, estimate N inputs on an annual scale, identify the microbes fixing N, and examine the plant-microbe relationships underlying this process. Looking forward to this exciting, challenging project!