Back in the Swing of Things

Busyness has kept me away from the blogging in the past couple of weeks. The semester has wrapped up and I will not be teaching over the summer, which is a relief to my schedule. I took a week off to visit my family in Ohio. No mossy stories to report from there, but it was great to have a vacation!

I also heard back about the grants that I applied for back in March. I am thrilled to report that I received all four of the grants! Let me tell you that this was quite a surprise. Grants to fund research in the biological sciences are highly competitive. (For grant applications to the National Science Foundation ~15% of the grants are funded.) Often researchers apply multiple times before receiving funding for their research. Thus I am excited and honored to be awarded the funding from these national and international competitions. It is great to know that others in my field think that my research ideas are exciting and interesting. I am looking forward to a summer filled with research on my mosses that will entail a lot of electron microscopy.

Here is a list of the awards I received and links to the funding agencies.
Stanley Greene Award: International Association of Bryologists (1 of 3 awarded)
Graduate Student Research Award: Botanical Society of America (1 of 13 awarded)
Graduate Student Research Fellowship: American Microscopical Society (1 of 1 awarded)
Henry N. Andrews Endowment Fund: University of Connecticut Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dept.

Also I will be giving a Moss Walk at New Pond Farm in West Redding Connecticut on Saturday May 30th. Check out their webpage here for more details.