Chris just recently learned that he received $8000 from the Scholarship Committee of The Garden Club of America for the 2019 Garden Club of America Fellowship in Ecological Restoration. This award will help fund his project: "Parasites as Indicators of Biodiversity of Restored Oyster Reefs". Congratulations to Chris!!

Below are some images from the event on March 11 honoring all the recipients!

I was able to attend my first Working Group on Introduction and Transfers of Marine Organisms (WGITMO) meeting through the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). It was a fantastic experience meeting really amazing people from the ICES nations within the North Atlantic. I'm looking forward to the next one!

Several Blakeslee lab members attended the March 2019 Southeastern Estuarine Research Society meeting in Wilmington, NC, including Chris Moore (PhD student), Tim Lee (PhD student), and Corey Winkler (undergraduate honors student). And in extra exciting news, Chris won the award for best student oral presentation! 

I was a bit swamped in the fall 2018 so am a little behind on my posts here. So they have all come at once! Please see below for all the interesting things that happened in our lab this fall, including awards, presentations, conferences, field work, outreach, and Becca graduating!

Based on Chris' NC Sea Grant fellowship award from 2018, his research was featured in NC Sea Grant's "Coastwatch Currents" publication. The write-up can be found here: ​https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/currents/2019/01/parasites-partners-in-coastal-restoration/

This research was also featured in an ECU story here: ​https://rede.ecu.edu/2018/01/29/ecu-graduate-student-awarded-fellowship-for-work-with-marine-parasites/

Becca was hooded for December graduation on December 14, 2018. It was bittersweet!! Becca is the first graduate student to complete her work in my lab at ECU. We will miss her! Congratulations to Master Becca!

Amy Fowler and I received funding from MAPAIS to set up a new project looking at invasive snails and diatoms in the watersheds of Maryland. Below are some pictures from our chilly survey deployments.

Becca successfully defended her master's thesis on November 9th to a packed and enthusiastic crowd! Her thesis title was: A Crab Trilogy: influence of parasites on interactions and interrelations among two introduced and one native crab”. We were all very proud! See images below.