Outreach
Talks, art, and time spent in ponds.
Talks and interviews
Discovering animals in the deep sea
Café Sci at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, August 2026. A talk on the Ocean Shot project: recording gelatinous animals intact in the water, and the tools being built to do it. See the project page for the work itself.
New England Biolabs podcast
May 2026. A conversation ranging across multicellular development in a close animal relative, the Ocean Shot work in the deep sea, and the salamander-alga symbiosis.
Green Grow the Salamanders
An episode of the American Museum of Natural History’s Shelf Life series on the salamander-alga symbiosis, produced by Erin Chapman and featuring Ryan Kerney and Eunsoo Kim.
Alumni Master Class
A Master Class for Franklin & Marshall College alumni, September 2021. A circuitous path from nearly failing out of college, through geoscience, NASA, the USGS, and a sailboat, to molecular biology and protists, with thanks along the way to the mentors at F&M who made me believe I could. It ends with the marine science, including the three-week cruise off San Diego that August.
Writing
Algae living in salamanders, friend or foe?
A short piece for TheScienceBreaker, written with Ryan Kerney, on what the transcriptomes showed about the salamander-alga symbiosis and why the answer is not simply one or the other.
Art and the public
Symbiotext
An art-science collaboration with audio artist John Roach. I wrote code that turned the salamander and algal genomes into speech and text, and Roach built those outputs into a dynamic sculpture. Shown in New York in February 2018 as part of LIGO: The Art of Science.
Boothbay Region High School
Every couple of years I work with the AP biology class at Boothbay Region High School, at the invitation of their teacher, Emily Higgins. The work included classroom visits and field studies of salamander eggs.
Rise and Shine Youth Retreat
Night hikes with Rise and Shine, a youth retreat program in Maine. In 2021 and 2022, groups came to Bigelow Laboratory to learn about salamanders and their eggs, then hiked local preserves to see the spring migration and breeding. We walked the Pine Tree and Linekin Preserves of the Boothbay Region Land Trust in 2021, and Hidden Valley Nature Center in 2022, and on those hikes we watched salamanders mating and laying eggs.
The program ended with the loss of its founder, Nicole Mokeme, in June 2022.
Challenge Yourself to Change
For several years we ran field and laboratory activities with Challenge Yourself to Change, a youth program in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Spring salamander egg hunts and microscopy nights. The program ended when its founder, Rocky Sayles, died.
- Salamander egg hunts: one · two
- Microscopy night