Education & Outreach
Welcome 2024 Summer Students!
The Seltzer Lab is excited to welcome our 2024 summer students Mollie McGibbon (Summer Student Fellow) and Colby Firnrohr (CC-CREW intern) who will be working with Alan, Katelyn, and members of the Motta Lab (Laura Motta and Frank Dorman) to develop and test multiple in-situ systems for dissolved gas analysis and large-volume gas sampling. We'll be carrying out laboratory experiments and field trials in local shallow water systems throughout the summer to disentangle physical and biogeochemical dissolved gas tracer signals using a miniRUEDI portable mass spectrometer. We're also building a degassing system inspired by recent advances to measure trace mercury gas in seawater, in collaboration with the Motta Lab.
Photo: from left to right, Alan, Mollie, Colby, Frank, and Laura (on the ladder) carry out a bubble-injection test with in-situ dissolved gas measurements in the "Bert" tank at WHOI's AVAST Innovation Hub. [photo credit: Justin Ossolinksi]
New public museum exhibit on ice age atmospheric circulation now live at NCAR!
In August 2024, our "Winds Through Time: Ice Age Impacts on Climate" exhibit launched at the public exhibition hall in the National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesa Campus in Boulder, Colorado. This interactive exhibit allows for visitors to change the topography and ice extent over North America by moving different colored blocks, which alters the atmospheric circulation shown visually by a projector based on the ice age climate modeling work of our interdisciplinary group (Amaya et al., 2022). This project was supported by NSF 2102457 (via the former P2C2 program) and included collaborators at CU Boulder, NCAR/UCAR, NOAA, and Yale. The museum exhibit aspect of the project first involved a CU Boulder ATLAS institute course in which the scientists presented on active research related to paleohydrology in western North America to undergraduate and graduate students who designed prototype exhibits showcasing coupled ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere dynamics over the course of a semester. A project by ATLAS Ph.D. student David Hunter was selected for professional fabrication, which turned into the permanent exhibit now on display at NCAR. Check it out if you're in the area!
Internship Program (Summer 2022):
Davion Dossous, a rising junior at New Heights Charter School of Brockton, joined the lab as an intern for Summer 2022. Davion is studying temporal changes in the physical and biogeochemical structure of Siders Pond (Falmouth, MA), through a combination of field work (measuring profiles of T, S, pH, conductivity, dissolved O2), assisting with sample collection in the Seltzer and Wankel labs, and data analysis and visualization. Check out Davion's blog!
Since Fall 2020, we have been working with the WHOI Broader Impacts Group to develop a partnership between WHOI and New Heights Charter School in Brockton, MA to connect 10th-grade Earth Science students to WHOI scientists, provide in-class lectures, lab tours, a mentorship program, and a summer internship program. We ran an "Ask-a-Scientist" program during the remote 2020-21 school year, and participated in lesson design and in-class teaching visits in fall and spring 2022.
Resources from past courses taught (feel free to adapt & use!):