Last year we added a northern headquarters for CALeDNA, building a brand new lab space for storing and processing eDNA samples in the Coastal Biology Building at UC Santa Cruz. As soon as we were ready to get running, students joined the Meyer lab and started research internships during the Winter quarter, extracting and processing DNA from >300 samples in a short time. In Spring quarter, the lab work ramped down because of COVID, but we were heartened to see our student team grow in numbers and take on challenging bioinformatic analyses to do hypothesis-driven research with eDNA-based biodiversity.
I’m thrilled the be able to introduce the lab’s undergraduate researchers. Several of them graduated this quarter and are continuing research with us during the summer as alumn! Two undergraduates who are going into their senior year received CALeDNA Summer Research Internships sponsored by Dr. Beth Shapiro’s HHMI Professorship grant. We’ll be still heavily doing informatic work as we ramp up lab-based research again, and I’m confident these students will be co-authoring research papers and sharing their work on our research pages.
Undergraduates and recent graduates in the lab: Colin Fairbairn, Haylee Bregoff, Taylor Hedblad, Julian Bui, Dexter Fan, Emily Soth, Nick Dykstra, and Hailey Nava.
