This semester, Spring 2019, I founded DAWG, a group of graduate students and post docs that meet every month during the semester to analyze a dataset. This semester we have a dataset from a professor at a Penn State branch campus and he was never able to analyze his 454 dataset. So, we are analyzing it for him! There are four group leaders, each of whom will give a workshop (2 hours) to the DAWG group and there will be a total of 4 workshops throughout the semester. We plan to work through the dataset from raw sequences all the way to publication ready graphs/images and statistical analyses. At the end of the semester, the four group leaders will give a presentation on the data to the Microbiome Center at Penn State. My hope is that we can continue the DAWG meetings every semester, provided there is enough student/postdoc participation and datasets for us to use. 

In January, 2019, I traveled to San Diego to give a poster presentation at the SSSA International Soils meeting. I met a lot of great people and I got to share some of my dissertation research. I am really excited about my research topic and would be happy to send a higher quality version of my poster (below).