Field Expeditions
What's really happening in nature?
While I spend a majority of my time in the lab, my questions aim to explain what is occuring in the natural environment. To stay relevant, we must be inspired by (and go into) nature!
Porto, Portugal
TREC officially started in April 2023, but the Advanced Mobile Lab ("TREC-Truck"; pictured above) was late for the first two stops. So it was not until going to Porto this October that I had the opportunity to see and work in it. This mobile lab is fully-loaded with a high-pressure freezer, plunge freezer, epifluoresence microscope, wide-angle stereomicroscope, confocal microscope, dissecting microscopes, an imaging flow cytometer, chemical hood, culture chambers, and a small wetlab all packed in the back of an expandable semi-trailer for all your sample observation and fixation needs! In addition to the marine plankton, we also sample some photosymbioses from the beach including lichens (top-right), and the famous Roscoff worm (bottom-right)
Hafnarfjörður, Iceland
In the summer of 2022, part of "WeFreezeOnTheBeach" team and new colleagues travelled to the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute (MFRI) to sample coastal waters of Iceland which also served as a pilot mission of the upcoming EMBL TREC (Traversing European Coastlines) global biology initiative. We once again had the rare opportunity to carry out cryo-preservation at a unique field site! And as luck would have it, we also arrived one week after the eruption of Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland and got a spectacular show courtesy of Earth's molten core!
Villefrance-sur-mer
In the summer of 2021, I arrived in France just in time to visit the Oceanic Observatory of Villefranche-sur-mer for "WeFreezeOnTheBeach" which brought state-of-the-art cryofixation expertise from EMBL and Leica to a marine field sampling expedition. It was a unique chance to sample the biologically rich Mediterranean waters (including Acantharia) and an unprecedented opportunity to cryopreserve freshly sampled marine plankton.
