Author Archives: Rachel Simmons

More COVID-19 Impacts

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Rachel Simmons

We’ve mentioned the impacts of COVID-19 on our field trips, but the overall purpose of this project–determining the impact of plastic pollution on coastal microbes–is more urgent than ever. As reported by Scientific American, increased use of personal protective equipment … Continue reading →

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More conferences and workshops

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Rachel Simmons

It’s hard to believe January is well over half gone! Ana and I have been quite busy going to workshops and conferences to share our news and experiences. I attended a grantsmanship workshop January 9-10 hosted by the NSF STEM … Continue reading →

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Education Research Results and Presentations

Posted on June 21, 2019 by Rachel Simmons

Ana and I are “dividing and conquering” in terms of sharing results. I am at the American Society for Microbiology’s annual meeting presenting our preliminary results on student outcomes while Ana is at a Gordon Research Conference doing the same. … Continue reading →

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Collaborations and expansion

Posted on March 25, 2018 by Rachel Simmons

Hi all! I’d like to share some exciting developments of the project! First off, we found a new collaborator, Dr. Jeff Bowman at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, to assist us in bioinformatics analyses! You can find his website here: … Continue reading →

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Re-Analysis and Validation!

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Rachel Simmons

Thanks to your contributions, we were able to purchase the Geneious software package to validate our analyses. I’m still in the midst of pre-processing for our sequences–since we have millions of reads and low quality data can result in inaccurate species identification, it’s … Continue reading →

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Information Overload!

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Rachel Simmons

This week Ana and Rachel attended a workshop on metagenomics hosted by Liz Dinsdale at San Diego State University.  From DNA extraction all the way through sequencing and analysis, we were able to produce metagenomes from shotgun sequencing from some … Continue reading →

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