The Antarctic adventure has begun! Right after Christmas, I left my family home in Chicago and headed off to Punta Arenas. The next day, was a whirlwind of orientation meetings, trying on ECW gear (extreme cold weather clothing loaned to cruise participants by the US Antarctic Program), last-minute shopping, and moving onto the ship. After…

(this post was written by Ph.D. student Cory Berger) My name is Cory Berger, and I’m a new student in the Tarrant lab. I’m still getting settled in to life as a graduate student, but I’ve already had some memorable experiences, and I’m going to be writing about one of them today. I recently participated…

Carolyn Tepolt and I will be teaching a new course on Marine Adaptation in Spring 2019! The class will be offered to students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program as a “Topics Course.” Topics Courses meet once per week and typically provide a mix of lecture and in-depth discussion of primary literature, kind of like a seminar…

Thursday was a special day in our lab. Hanny Rivera successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis titled: Genetic connectivity, Adaptation, and Phenotypic Plasticity of Corals and Anemones under Thermal Stress. Much of Hanny’s work focused on characterizing genetic structure within populations of the massive reef-building coral Porites lobata. In these studies, Hanny collaborated most closely with Anne Cohen…

I was recently invited to speak to graduate students from the Cellular and Molecular Biology Program at the University of Michigan. They asked me to provide a broad perspective, speaking not only about my current research but also about the training I received and the path that brought me to where I am now. As…

(above, Venus at her Mirror, East Pacific Rise by Lily Simonson, photo used with permission) A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Lily Simonson and to talk with her afterward. Lily is a wonderfully talented artist who has embarked on some spectacular adventures during which she has immersed herself in…

I see beauty in nature and even in a well-designed experiment or a cleverly constructed sentence. But I think we all experience that beauty in a different way, and I supposed the level of enthusiasm for experimental design and grammatical elegance is highly variable. I try hard to describe my field of research and share…