Oysters with Barnacles, Turtles with Backpacks. Our turn at the St. Mary's County STEM Festival & Expo

On November 14, three of our members, Suzan Shahrestani, Aimee Hoover, and Emily Liljestrand, all attended the St. Mary's County STEM Festival and Expo.  Here, students from public schools around the county came out to enjoy demonstrations, interactive games, and dozens of local and state scientific resources.  Naturally, as a local marine science institute, the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and its graduate students were more than happy to help out.  We had a running video of Ms. Hoover's experiments on the best method to tag and track baby sea turtles (the titular "turtle backpacks"), an oyster shell under a dissection microscope to show all the organisms that need this hard surface to grow, and a collection of multicolored beads to demonstrate how sampling works.  And of course, we provided fish puzzles to teach identification/classification and handed out CBL stickers to any interested youngsters.  Check out some photos of our booth and the event as a whole:

Our trifold board with information relevant to the demonstrations

Suzan setting up her laptop to show underwater images of jellyfish and fish.

And of course, our adoring public:

And a few of the other attractions (AKA, the competition):

We were happy to be invited! We look forward to helping out again next year.

The One Where We go to the MEES Colloquium

Once a year, in the autumn, like the falling of the leaves or the contracting of the days, something occurs like clockwork.  The students of the Marine Estuarine and Environmental Sciences (MEES) graduate program at the University of Maryland meet at one of the several campuses to discuss outreach, communication skills, and just, shall we say "socialize" with the other students and faculty.  Last year we had the privileged to host this ourselves.  So for many this was either our first MEES colloquium, or at least the first one where we weren't running around like chickens with no heads.  All in all, the 1.5 day meeting was engaging, informative, and entertaining.

See below for our summary of the event.  I'll just say now, there's an astronaut involved. Get psyched.

Friday October 30, 2015, 9:00AM SHARP
We all take off towards Annapolis in our respective vehicles.  Those of us in Solomons who were planning to spend the night at the conference hotel all caravaned in one of our campus vehicles.

Friday October 30, 2015, 10:30ish

We arrived at the Crowne Plaza Annapolis and picked up our registration packets and name badges.  The MEES office was selling some sweet t-shirts as well!

 

Friday October 30, 2015, 11:00AM
We had our annual MEES student meeting, led by CBL PhD student Jenna Luek where we brainstormed about ways we can network professionally and socially as a MEES student group.  Suggestions included an alumni networking event on the professional side and "MEES Olympics" and/or a pirate cruise for the social aspect.

Friday October 30, 2015, All Afternoon
After a delicious lunch, the Friday afternoon session included updates on the new MEES curriculum and UMCES accreditation, as well as some professional development from the great folks at the Integrative Application Network (IAN).  We got to try our hand at make useful diagrams for presentations and publications, and we also go to practice creating "and/but/therefore" statements, some of which were submitted to our event Facebook page, to convey our research to the public.  Overall, it was a really informative and useful afternoon!

Friday October 30, 2015, Poster Session

After the afternoon session at the hotel, we headed to the historic Banneker-Douglass Museum in downtown Annapolis for our evening activities.  We started with a great poster session of 3rd-year MEES students (CBL students Grey Redding and Aimee Hoover shown below).

Friday October 30, 2015, Astronaut Talk

The highlight of the night was an amazing talk by MEES alumnus Ricky Arnold.  Ricky did his masters in the MEES program studying submerged aquatic vegetation in the Chesapeake Bay and after he graduated he joined NASA as an astronaut.  Ricky was a member of shuttle mission in 2009 which delivered a final pair of power-generating solar array wings and truss elements to the International Space Station.  Ricky dazzled us with photos of his space mission and gave us a fantastic view of Earth from space.  CBL students Kevin Kahover and Hillary Glandon were pretty excited to meet such an awesome celebrity!

 

Saturday October 31, 2015, Morning

After an evening of touring the local alcohol dispensing establishments, getting to see many of the residents dressed befitting the Halloween-eve night, we arose the next day for breakfast and presentations from graduate students in four areas of study.  Four MEES PhD students gave presentations on their graduate research, ranging from nutrient removal after farming on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to copepod deaths in the Chesapeake Bay, to sponge symbioses in the Caribbean.  Our own Hillary Glandon (shown below presenting in a Halloween and science appropriate crab hat!) won first place for her work on the effects of temperature and acidification on blue crab in the Chesapeake bay. That's not all. Our own Jenna Leuk also walked home tied four ways for first place in the poster competition.  Bravo to them both!

We look forward to taking back to our home institutes all the information we learned at this educational colloquium.  We'll consider putting our research into a coherent, narrative form when explaining it to fellow scientists and laymen alike.  We'll consider using the IVN's extensive image library and resources when designing posters and presentations.  But above all, we look forward to organizing events with our fellow MEES students, who we know all the better because we had this event.