We finished out Spring 2024 celebrating the B.Sc. graduation of lab members Tim Love and Aylha Pferschy! Aylha will be continuing in the lab as an early entry masters student.
We had a joint lab BBQ with Lab LaBella from Bioinformatics and then an impromptu birthday lunch the week after graduation. The calm before a busy summer!!
This semester, the Carter lab hosted four students from the Charlotte Early Engineering College as they worked on a mock start-up. They worked in the lab culturing various common fungi on plastic and media to investigate plastic degradation. Congrats to Nathan, Sidney, Max, and Kylie on a winning presentation at their Senior Expo showing off their Fungi Fusion prototype!
Graduate students Dallas and Bhuwan volunteered at Science on the Rocks, a science outreach event geared towards adults and hosted by the Discovery Place. They brought along with them some of our more charismatic fungi for people to see what fungi look like beyond Mario mushrooms and fairy rings. Our more colorful isolates were definitely the crowd favorites!!
Dr. Carter attended the Fungal Genetics meeting for the first time and what an incredible experience. She presented a poster on our recent preprint and came back to the lab with great new ideas and connections.
During the last week of February 2024, Lauren, Dallas, and Bhuwan represented the Carter Lab at the Southern Division meeting of the American Phytopathological Society in Columbia, South Carolina. Dallas presented her search for endofungal bacteria in important plant pathogens. We are grateful for the USDA support for this project and for funding their participation in this meeting!
The Carter Lab participated in the annual Research Meet & Greet hosted by the graduate students of the Department of Biological Sciences. Undergrads from around campus were invited to connect with labs and learn more about research on campus. We loved connecting with new potential lab members and other interested students!
And kudos to the grad students for their hard work in hosting this event!
It is bittersweet to see undergraduate Tim wrap up his time in the lab. Having worked with us summer and fall of 2023 on motility and competition projects, he is moving on to a part-time job in a physical therapy clinic. As glad as we are for this opportunity that will help him achieve his goal of becoming a physical therapist, we’ll miss his great questions and thoughtful perspective!
We’re already finding that the fun of an academic lab is that as one person rotates out, another comes in. So we are excited to welcome new undergraduate researcher Paola Diaz-Matamoros who will be working with Dallas on our novel interactions with Fusarium spp. project.
Almost all lab members got together to enjoy lunch at the close of the fall semester and celebrate the first year of the Carter Lab. We toasted to Alison’s B.Sc. graduation and Ruth’s M.Sc. graduation – both are continuing in the lab next semester as M.Sc. and Ph.D. students, respectively. Though Tim couldn’t make it, he was still there in spirit (and photoshop).
The Carter Lab showed up in full force for our first Biological Sciences Research Symposium with 3 students presenting small-format posters focused on the methods for their projects. Bhuwan and Dallas both got perfect scores from their science communication judges!
A new undergraduate researcher has joined the lab – Aylha Pferschy. She is a senior in biological sciences and will be working on basic culturing and phenotyping of a novel bacterial-fungal symbiosis as part of a collaboration with USDA ARS.
