Last week, Dr. Shawn Arellano and Dr. Tanika Ladd presented work at the 17th Deep-Sea Biology Symposium at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in Hong Kong SAR, China. The week was filled with so much science, networking, eating delicious food, and not letting the jet lag get the best of us!
Shawn presented an update on the work associated with the NSF funded project “The impact of symbiont-larval interactions on species distributions across southwestern Pacific hydrothermal vents” which included sharing the work of recently graduated master’s student, Michelle McCartha and soon-to-be-graduated master’s student, Vanessa Jimenez.
Tanika gave a talk on progress from the most recent larval lab cruise to the East Pacific Rise and the NSF funded project “The predictive nature of microbial biofilms for cuing larval settlement at deep-sea hydrothermal vents” which included some preliminary work from current master’s student Wyatt Heimbichner Goebel.
We even got to catch up with ex-larval lab team member, Dexter Davis (now a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara)!
Overall, it was a very successful and productive week and we even got a little time to explore the wonderful city of Hong Kong before making the long trek back to Washington. These international conferences are so inspiring as we get to see and share all the newest research going on all around the world and catch up with the amazing deep-sea research community. We greatly appreciate all the hard work by local organizing committee at HKUST for putting this conference together and supporting Tanika with a travel award that allowed her to attend.
