From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.
Kasia Ahern has joined the Botany Department at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) on detail as a Collections Program Technician (CPT). She graduated from the George Washington University with a Master of Arts in Museum Studies, specializing in collections management. While in graduate school, she worked as a collections management intern for the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) within the Department of Anthropology at NMNH. After graduating in 2015, she worked as a contractor in the Division of Fishes at NMNH. Her primary duties as a contractor were cataloging, rehousing, inventorying, and digitizing film and prints using flatbed scanners as well as importing the images and associated metadata into the musuem’s electronic database system, EMu. She remained a contractor within the Divisions of Fishes and Amphibians & Reptiles until she became a CPT in 2019. While most of her time as a CPT has been spent cataloging and inventorying specimens in the Division of Birds, she briefly worked on rehousing the bryophyte collection within Botany. She began her detail in February 2022.
Savannah Mapes, a graduate student in dinoflagellate research, visited the Botany Department on 21-23 June 2022, to work on Dr. Maria Faust’s legacy material. Mapes is a fourth year PhD student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. She is studying the dynamics of harmful algal blooming (HAB) species in the lower Chesapeake Bay collecting data for the development of enhanced monitoring and mitigation strategies. She is also working on characterizing a local toxin-producing and bioluminescent HAB species, Alexandrium monilatum, describing its life cycle and using molecular techniques to investigate differences between strains. Mapes originally contacted Rose Gulledge for mentorship on a fellowship grant in December 2020. She then planned a visit to Botany and MSC to peruse Faust’s research material and other work-related documents, reprints, and library. Once finally here (she had to wait 1.5 years due to Covid restrictions), she found a treasure trove of HAB and dinoflagellate material from identification guides, teaching notes (complete with sketches), posters, photographs, SEM images, slides, and field notes. Faust’s taxonomic reviews, monographs and learning guides are essential reading for the HAB student; they are heavily used in the classroom as well as in the lab. Mapes’ future plans include continuing her career in scientific research on phytoplankton and creating a summer program for early career marine biology students to learn about the importance of phytoplankton and the marine environment through hands-on, field- and lab-based learning experiences.