Comprehensive Exam Complete (Phew!)

Congratulations to about-to-be-third-year students Ann Allen, Jamie Becker, Elizabeth Halliday, Kathryn Kauffman, Meredith White, and Maya Yamato. They've all just passed their qualifying exam with flying colors. Here's the exam they took. [I've omitted the questions that were written for individual students by their advisors.]

Joint Program External Review

The External Review Committee for the Joint Program has now completed their visit. Thank you to all who participated by providing me with data or meeting with the committee.

In preparation for the review, Jim Price prepared an overview of the Joint Program to provide some background for the Committee. I thought this document might be interesting (maybe even useful) for everyone, but especially for those of you students and staff who are new to the institution. Here it is.

I've also posted the presentation that I gave to the Committee here. [See if you can catch the embarrassing typo!] Without the narrative to go along with the slides some of them may not seem to have much context. I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have.

During the course of the review, it became clear to me that we (the WHOI Biology Department) do not have a shared vision of what the Joint Program in Biological Oceanography is, and what it should be. I hope we can have a discussion soon after we have the Review Committee's report.

Microbial sequence data workshop

The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) is offering a workshop on the phylogenetic analyses of nucleotide sequences from microorganisms.  The workshop will be held July 29 – 30, 2009, at WHOI.  For more information follow this link: /WHOI_ARB_workshop.pdf.