Hometown: Darmstadt, Germany

School: Technical University Darmstadt

Major: Micro and synthetic biology

Mote Program: Phytoplankton Ecology

Dear Sponsor,

First, I would like to thank you for your decision on sponsoring interns (including me), during their time at Mote. It is a big relief on the financial side, and I could enjoy my time at Mote a lot more carefree. I did my mandatory internship (3 months) and my Master Thesis (6 months) for my Master degree at Mote and invested in between those two an additional two months. So I by the time I am going to graduate in December, I spent almost an entire year here.

During my internship time, I had the chance to tag and release snook with Dr. Nathan Brennan, I worked at the Mote facility at the Keys a couple of days to help out at the coral restoration program and I had the time to prepare everything for my Master Thesis.

Currently, I am doing active research in the Phytoplankton department, with Dr. Vince Lovko. Dr. Lovko gave me my own research project on the effects of algicidal bacteria on the Florida Red Tide organism Karenia brevis. This includes mainly, setting up different treatments of the algae with the algicidal bacteria and looking at the results (counting viable algae cells), genetically work, toxin analysis and a lot of other small tasks. I carry out all of my genetically and bacterial work in a biosafety hood. Cell counts are done by eye under the microscope.

After the algae cells are counted, the data from each experiment needs to be processed. Usually, I plot my primary data (cell counts) and my secondary data (mathematically transformed data) and look at statistical values. So far, we could show algicidal activity for bacterial strains, which we received from other scientists. Own bacterial isolates showed no algicidal activity.

Plots of primary and secondary data