Climate change is the largest challenge facing people today, and our lab mission is to understand the microbiology of climate change and apply this knowledge towards climate solutions including biofuels. Read more about our approach and lab values… We work to understand how individual microbes function as part of communities, and how microbial functions scale … Continue reading Molecular Microbial Ecology Lab
Microbes are everywhere, and almost always live in complex communities. Students in my classes will be able to discuss how microbes are diverse, why diversity matters, and microbial interactions with the environment. Students are encouraged to develop skills of persistence, self compassion and courage, and to make use of the self evaluation rubric (pdf) on their … Continue reading Teaching
We’re hosting a Software Carpentry training for Unix, R, and Git!
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
This two-day workshop will be held on June 20 & 21, from 9:00am to 4:30pm on each day. Thanks to the NSF for providing lunch, coffee and snacks to fuel our learning!
We’re hiring! This position is a full-time postdoctoral researcher position in the UMass Molecular Microbial Ecology Lab, with the intention of studying the microbial traits associated with growth and resource acquisition from necromass biomolecules in soils and soil communities.
Research led by Luiz Domeignoz-Horta and Grace Pold shows that chronic warming stress decreases the rate at which soil microbes respire CO2—but that this effect is dampened after leaf litter inputs from fall.
We have a new project sponsored by the Department of Energy to address the question, How do microbes and minerals make necromass that persists?
We are looking for a graduate student researcher to conduct field and laboratory studies to trace 13C-labeled substrates through food webs and into soil compartments into stable, microbial, or mineral (CO2) fates.
Are you interested in research at the intersection of microbiology, ecology, and biogeochemistry? Do you want to work with molecular data, sequencing, stable isotopes, proteomics, and modeling? Do you want to work with an interdisciplinary team at the vibrant UMass Amherst in the beautiful Pioneer Valley?
We have funding for three years for a graduate student researcher to work on this project. Support includes 12 months of salary, paid tuition and fees, and medical and dental insurance. The successful candidate must also gain admissions to the Microbiology Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The graduate student will collect soils from the warming experiment, conduct the substrate addition experiments, extract proteins for the SIP-proteomics (to be performed by NCSU), extract DNA and perform SIP-metagenomics and community analysis. In addition, they will assist with mentorship of our summer high school student interns who will work with their laboratory projects.
Students can expect to gain expertise in molecular, microbiology, and bioinformatics skills as part of their degree. They will publish at least one first-author paper in a major journal, with more likely. They will travel to at least one national and international meeting per year, in addition to the DOE PI meeting, and present their research. Please review our lab expectations to understand more about our lab culture and values.
To apply, email Kristen DeAngelis and attach your curriculum vitae and a brief statement of your goals and interests. Applications to either Microbiology or Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) programs are due to the Graduate School on December 1, 2022.
The DOE has sponsored a new project for us to work with lead Jenny Bhatnagar and collaborators Pam Templer, Caitlin Hicks-Pries, Charlie Driscoll, and Elsa Abs at the Hubbard Brook CCASE warming and freeze-thaw experiment. How will microbes adapt to warming and alternative electron acceptors in a climate change future? We’ll let you know!
From left to right: DeAngelis, Templer, and Bhatnagar lab groups sampling CCASE in summer of 2022; Rachel Simoes, undergrad at UMass; Megan Mitchell, graduate student at UMass OEB.
Kristen DeAngelis 