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Alliance Happenings: National Diversity in STEM Conference
Sixty Alliance members attended the 2022 National Diversity in STEM Conference last month. The conference is organized by the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico this year. Alliance students, alumni, faculty and staff gathered to present their own research, attend conference sessions, and connect in person. Maria Barberena Arias and Pedro Maldonado Rivera served as amazing hosts for our Alliance pre-conference meeting. Thanks to the hard work of new workforce fellows Stephanie Lopez Rivera and Mairim Villafane Vicente, visitors also had a great welcoming packet to the San Juan area. Thanks also to those who contributed to the hurricane relief effort organized by Stephanie and Mairim.
Among the many Alliance members presenting at the conference was Guam hub’s graduate fellow Anthony “Ton” Ritter. Ton participated in a panel discussion at the SACNAS conference entitled Indigenous led approaches in national climate and conservation policy: Decolonizing conservation to deliver just and equitable outcomes on federal lands and waters driven by Tribal and Territorial communities. Ton was able to share his current thesis work with the Guam Restoration of Watersheds (GROW) Initiative and give his perspective on bringing your whole self into your science.
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Pictured: Guam hub undergraduate fellows Alyssa Calalo, Khazmyne Kawamoto, Raianne Quichocho, and Rebecca Salas presenting their research at the National Diversity in STEM Conference.
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On Monday, November 14th, the Mentoring Working Group hosted its first SEAS Table Talk with Dr. Chanda Littles. Dr. Littles is a Coastal Ecologist with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers - Portland District. Her research and professional experiences have spanned population biology, seagrass ecology, wetland policy and regulation, coastal ecosystem services, and restoration ecology. Dr. Littles shared her personal and professional journey with seven current and alumni SEAS participants. Attendees asked her advice on pursuing fellowships, the benefits of being a specialist vs.a generalist and how to define success within their own journey. The next Table Talk will be in February.
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SEAS Spotlight: Stephanie Lopez Rivera & Mairim Villafañe-Vicente
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The Puerto Rico hub is proud to announce that this year’s new Workforce Fellows will be Stephanie D. Lopez Rivera and Mairim M. Villafañe-Vicente. Stephanie and Mairim introduce themselves below.
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I am a graduate of the Sistema Universitario Ana G Mendez-Recinto Gurabo, where I completed my studies at the Department of Natural Sciences and technology with my concentration being General Biology. In my freshman year, I participated in the program SEA-PHAGES at Universidad de Puerto Rico-Recinto Cayey directed by Dr. Michael Rubin. In this program I did purification and characterization of bacteriophages of the Puerto Rican soil, functional and structural annotation of the bacteriophage Aliter, and an independent research project in bioinformatics, where I searched for stoperators in Aliter genome using DNA Master Software. When I transferred to Universidad Ana G. Méndez (UAGM), Professor Maria E. Ocasio’s Introduction to Research course offered me the opportunity to investigate and discover and ultimately present my first poster on the fungus Candida albicans. During the first year of the pandemic, I had the opportunity to be part of the program called TUERES directed by Alex Mercado, where I participated in measuring percentages of coral reef coverage using the software Coral Point Count (CPCe). My research focus changed to studying the morphology of the organism called Raghovelia velidae. As a SEAS Islands Alliance Workforce Fellow, I will bring my unwavering desire to get composure and growth, so in the future I can be someone to look up to for those hungry for knowledge who will be the future of tomorrow.
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I am a Puerto Rican woman native to Gurabo and I recently graduated from UAGM in Gurabo with a General Biology bachelor’s degree. I participated in the TuEres research program where my first experience was to identify arthropod communities that were found in a fallen tree of Costa Rica with Dr. Tamara Heartsill and Dr. María Barberena. We identified 1,232 arthropods in leaves samples and 1,012 in trunk samples. Later, I started my participation in the mangrove reflectance project in the Bioluminescent Bay in La Parguera with Maria Barberena and Juan Torres. These experiences sparked my interest in the electromagnetic spectrum. Meanwhile, I took a bioinformatic course where I worked with the SEA-PHAGES project. In this course I had to identify the SCAMP phage, which was a new type of virus that was found in the ground. I was doing protein identification, genome sequencing, and identification of mechanism functions using DNA Master. The last project I participated in TuEres was about coastal erosion and accretion in Puerto Rico. I learned about concepts and programs like GIS (Geographic Information System). In 2021, I had the opportunity to be in a summer internship in Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (JBNERR), where I learned to use YSI EXO-2 probes for measuring water quality. I also learned how to do a correct census of organisms, which gave me knowledge about coastal birds and how to record them in Google Earth. Because of my interest in coastal water, organism diversity and coral reefs, I became a SEAS Islands Alliance Workforce Fellow in 2022. Next I will apply to graduate school in the Marine-Estuarine Environmental Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, and I would like to add courses about marine geology.
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Making Waves
John Sacayan, Guam’s current SEAS Undergraduate Fellow along with SEAS alumni Edriel Aquino (GROW 2017) and Daniel Mabagos (SEAS UG Fellow 2021) participated in the 2022 Annual Water and Wastewater Conference held in Guam. Together they presented their research entitled Effect of Plant Root Reinforcement in Improving Soil Shear Strength achieving first place in the undergraduate research presentation category!
Guam’s 2021 Undergraduate Fellow and 2022 Bridge to PhD participant Anela Duenas co-authored her first-ever publication with our newest SEAS faculty mentor Dr. Brett Taylor. Their article entitled “Decadal changes in parrotfish assemblages around reefs of Guam, Micronesia” can be found in this year’s Coral Reefs Journal of the International Coral Reef Society.
Delsa Gonzalez, USVI’s Workforce fellow, has had a great year working with TNC as one of their coral practitioners, outplanting over 800 Elkhorn coral in the East End Marine Park. She took part in two spawning events, each session a different brain coral species and successfully rearing them into the wild to monitor later. Other projects that have highlighted her fellowship have been restoring Buck Island National Monument with Elkhorn outplanting efforts, as well as using reef stars – a project piloted in the Caribbean by MARS to stabilize the rubble around Buck Island and promote growth of corals on these structures. Lastly, she accumulated approximately 150 dives during this year alone through all the active restoration and monitoring!
Congratulations to USVI’s Graduate Fellow, Jendahye Antoine, who had her thesis defense presentation on November 16, 2022. Jendahye successfully defended her topic on “Palatability of the invasive seagrass Halophila stipulacea against native seagrasses from the U.S. Virgin Islands: Testing the Enemy Release Hypothesis with Caribbean invertebrates.”
Congratulations to Arelys Chaparro, a Bridge program participant in the summer of 2021, who successfully defended her thesis titled “Investigating relationships between disease and coral interactions with benthic community members” on November 18.
This fall, the PR hub has welcomed our newest cohort of SEAS Centro TORTUGA undergraduate students. They have already been very busy doing field work and learning the good and the challenging aspects of our work at Laguna Grande. Students are working on new protocols for counting the dominant dinoflagellates in the lagoon, are measuring primary productivity, and have been troubleshooting our sensor-gone-bad, a learning experience so many of us in marine science go through!
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The University of the Virgin Islands’ Master of Science in Marine & Environmental Science (MMES) program is now accepting applications! The application period opens November 1 and closes March 1, 2023. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance status by April 1. If an applicant has any questions about the application process, contact the MMES Program Coordinator at sophia.mckenzie@uvi.edu. For additional information about the application process please visit here.
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On The Horizon
April 2023 - SEAS Islands Alliance Virtual Summit
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