November and December

End of Year Lab Celebration - Lotterhos Lab Awards

Katie gives seminars in Vienna

Katie was a Distinguished Speaker in the "SFB Polygenic Adaptation" Lecture Series, and gave a short workshop on App-Building 101.

Madeline Eppley wins award

Madeline was awarded $500 through NEAMGLL (Northeastern Association of Marine and Great Lakes Laboratories) to attend the Milford Aquaculture Seminar.

Nicole Mongillo defends Honors Thesis "Characterizing growth and survival variation of geographically distinct juvenile oysters in an aquaculture common garden"

Nicole's research lays the foundation for our research studying genomic variation in the Eastern oyster.

Lab conducts another field trip to our 

common garden sites in the Chesapeake Bay

We're at 18 months with raising different oyster populations in common gardens! We raise the oysters in mesh bags on racks, which allows us to monitor growth and mortality.

October

Kiran was named to the Huntington 100

The Huntington 100 is a prestigious award to undergraduates at Northeastern University. Congrats Kiran!

Lotterhos Lab at SOURCE

Undergrad Zoe Chapman represented our lab at the Northeastern SOURCE event.

September

Our paper "DNA methylation modulates transcriptional noise in response to elevated pCO2 in the eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica)" is accepted for publication at Environmental Epigenetics

The Annual Report for the Northeastern University Marine Science Center is out!

Check it out: https://issuu.com/northeasterncollegeofscience/docs/final_mes_23_annual_report 

NSF funds our proposal to investigate how a invasive fruit fly adapts to climate change

Our proposal with Nick Keets (U. Kentucky) and Joaquín Nuñez (U. Vermont) on Organism Responses to Climate Change: Climate change responses in a globally invasive insect: Quantifying the roles of local adaptation, seasonal adaptation, and phenotypic plasticity was funded by the National Science Foundation! In this research, the Nunez and Keets labs will study the genomics and physiology of the invasive spotted wing fruit fly that negatively effects berry crops. The Lotterhos Lab will develop eco-evolutionary simulations to understand the interplay of these different evolutionary dynamics in organism's response to climate change, which we will use to understand the spread of this invasive pest. We are excited for postdoc Jiseon Min to join us next year and work on this project! Read more in this press article

Undergrads Kiran Bajaj and Leila Curtis receive PEAK awards from Northeastern University

Way to go Kiran and Leila!

August

Graduate student Madeline Eppley leads the BIMODAL workshop

In today’s digital landscape, where effective science communication is essential, three graduate students from the College of Science launched the inaugural BIMODAL (Belonging in Media: Opportunities in Digital Academic Landscapes) workshop, held on August 27th and 29th, at Northeastern University, with participants from an array of majors across the College of Science.

Designed to address the need for science communication training and to promote belonging in STEM fields for underrepresented groups, BIMODAL provided participants with practical tools to enhance their digital presence, science writing, and networking in virtual academic spaces. The workshop was led by College of Science graduate students Madeline Eppley, Angela Jones, and Lindsey Forg, and funded by the COS DEIJ Equity Action Grant.

BIMODAL WORKSHOP

We start work on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

We start collaborating with The Bluefin Collaborative to develop a citizen science sampling program on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. This work will lay the foundation for future genomic analyses that will inform the stock structure and census size of this economically important species.

July

Lotterhos Lab at Evolution 2024 in Montreal

Dr. Lotterhos, Madeline Eppley, Leila Curtis, Nicole Mongillo, Lee Fennucio, and former postdoc Remy Gatins and her student Annabel Hughes all attended the Evolution conference this year. Highlights include the "Advances in Marine Evolution" symposium and the "Predicting evolutionary responses to environmental change" symposium organized by Dr. Lotterhos.

Northeastern News highlights our research

The Lotterhos Lab is predicting how species adapt to climate change, starting with oysters.

https://research.northeastern.edu/the-lotterhos-lab-is-predicting-species-biodiversity-starting-with-oysters/ 

1. Over the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in the development of predictive models at the intersection of molecular ecology, genomics, and global change. The common goal of these ‘genomic forecasting’ models is to integrate genomic data with environmental and ecological data in a model to make quantitative predictions about the vulnerability of populations to climate change.

2. Despite rapid methodological development and the growing number of systems in which genomic forecasts are made, the forecasts themselves are rarely evaluated in a rigorous manner with ground-truth experiments. This study reviews the evaluation experiments that have been done, introduces important terminology regarding the evaluation of genomic forecasting models, and discusses important elements in the design and reporting of ground-truth experiments.

3. To date, experimental evaluations of genomic forecasts have found high variation in the accuracy of forecasts, but it is difficult to compare studies on a common ground due to different approaches and experimental designs. Additionally, some evaluations may be biased toward higher performance because training data and testing data are not independent. In addition to independence between training data and testing data, important elements in the design of an evaluation experiment include the construction and parameterization of the forecasting model, the choice of fitness proxies to measure for test data, the construction of the evaluation model, the choice of evaluation metric(s), the degree of extrapolation to novel environments or genotypes, and the sensitivity, uncertainty and reproducbility of forecasts.

4. Although genomic forecasting methods are becoming more accessible, evaluating their limitations in a particular study system requires careful planning and experimentation. Meticulously designed evaluation experiments can clarify the robustness of the forecasts for application in management. Clear reporting of basic elements of experimental design will improve the rigour of evaluations, and in turn our understanding of why models work in some cases and not others.

June

We set up our Eelgrass Adaptations experiment at Tjärnö Marine Lab in Sweden!

Eelgrass is a unique type of grass that only lives in saltwater, and forms important habitat for invertebrates and juvenile fish. 

In collaboration with Marlene Janke at the University of Gothenberg, we are studying how different eelgrass genotypes will be adapted to climate change in the Baltic Sea. Katie, Camille, and Jalen drove with Marlene around Sweden to collect eelgrass ecotypes. We then brought them back to Tjärnö Marine Lab and are raising them in a giant common garden experiment with current and future conditions. We will also use this data to test genomic forecasting models and inform restoration goals for Sweden.

May

Our paper "Lighting pathways to success in STEM: a virtual Laboratory Meeting Programme (LaMP) mutually benefits mentees and host laboratories" is out in Royal Society B!

Link to publication: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2024.0149?af=R 

Figure 1. The virtual LaMP facilitates training and networking of the mentee (blue) through virtual interactions with the host research laboratory (warm colours). Illustration by Christina Chung.

About the paper: Developing robust professional networks can help shape the trajectories of early career scientists. Yet, historical inequities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields make access to these networks highly variable across academic programmes, and senior academics often have little time for mentoring. Here, we illustrate the success of a virtual Laboratory Meeting Programme (LaMP). In this programme, we matched students (mentees) with a more experienced scientist (mentors) from a research group. The mentees then attended the mentors’ laboratory meetings during the academic year with two laboratory meetings specifically dedicated to the mentee’s professional development. Survey results indicate that mentees expanded their knowledge of the hidden curriculum as well as their professional network, while only requiring a few extra hours of their mentor’s time over eight months. In addition, host laboratories benefitted from mentees sharing new perspectives and knowledge in laboratory meetings. Diversity of the mentees was significantly higher than the mentors, suggesting that the programme increased the participation of traditionally under-represented groups. Finally, we found that providing a stipend was very important to many mentees. We conclude that virtual LaMPs can be an inclusive and cost-effective way to foster trainee development and increase diversity within STEM fields with little additional time commitment.

MSC Grad Symposium

Madeline and Camille did an awesome job presenting their research at the Northeastern Marine Science Center Grad symposium.

Field work at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science

This is for our "Model Validation Program" project. We are monitoring the survival and growth of oyster genotypes collected from Texas to Maine. Many thanks to Camille Rumberger, Annabel Hughes, Kiran Bajaj, Nicole Mongillo, and Lee Fennucio for their help in the field this week!

April

Dr. Lotterhos is elected Secretary of the Society of American Naturalists

The American Society of Naturalists is the oldest scientific society dedicated to the study of ecology, evolution, and behavior.  Read about the election here.

Northeastern funds Dr. Lotterhos to lead a Virtual Lab Meeting Program (LaMP)

The funding comes from Northeastern's I3 fund for Inclusive Impact Innovation

More lab milestones and awards to celebrate!

Madeline Eppley - Melbourne R. Carriker award from the National Shellfisheries Association for their ancient oyster DNA project

Katie Lotterhos - paper published - Lighting pathways to success in STEM: A virtual Lab Meeting Program (LaMP) mutually benefits mentees and host labs. in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Practices paper

Katie Lotterhos - blog post published on her paper exploring conceptual issues in local adaptation and maladaptation

Leila Curtis - MSC Summer Internship and NOAA Hollings Scholar

Lee Fennucio - MSC Summer Internship

Camille Rumberger - Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation for her GRFP proposal!

March

Camille is awarded the ASF Fellowship

Camille is awarded an ASF fellowship for Americans in the Nordic Countries! This grant will support her research on genomic forecasting in eelgrass in the Baltic Sea.

High School Marine Science Symposium

We held our annual "Oyster Doctors" workshop at the Northeastern High School Marine Science Symposium. Many of the students who attend HSMSS are from schools without the resources to provide in-depth hands-on learning experiences.  The lead teacher from one of those schools specifically thanked us yesterday for including dissections and hands-on bio exploration as an option, because her students haven’t had any exposure to that experience due to school budget and curriculum restraints. Special thanks to Madeline Eppley for organizing the workshop!

286 high school students & teachers

13 school districts

48 exhibit table presenters

10 packed workshops on science, art, conservation

3 inspirational keynote panelists

26 STEM and environmental advocacy organizations

News @ Northeastern article

January-February

Nicole and Kiran are awarded a $3000 PEAK Award from Northeastern University for their research on how oyster genotype influences growth in an aquaculture setting.

Camille passed her oral exam.

Madeline successfully defended their PhD proposal and was admitted to candidacy.

Elisabeth was awarded a Dean's Distinguished Award from the College of Science and was accepted to graduate school.