Dr. Cayelan Carey recently hosted Dr. Michael Vanni, Professor of Zoology at the University of Miami-Ohio for an EEB seminar in Fralin Auditorium. Dr. Vanni’s presentation was titled “Farms, fish, phosphorus, and phytoplankton: Watershed subsidies and food webs regulate ecosystem dynamics in an agricultural reservoir.”

Dr. Vanni is a renowned freshwater ecology and fisheries expert; his lab studies the ecology of lakes and their surrounding landscapes, particularly focusing on how watersheds and lake food webs interact to regulate nutrient cycling and productivity; how fish mediate nutrient cycling in various ecosystems; and how carbon cycles in watershed-lake complexes.

Dr. Vanni is currently a rotating program officer overseeing the NSF Postdoctoral Biology program. During his visit to campus, he met with IGC Fellows and other Ecology graduate students/post-docs for a Q&A session over lunch.

According to Sydney Hope, “We talked about the specifics of the NSF Postdoctoral Biology program, including what NSF is looking for in an application, the benefits of getting one of these postdocs, and some examples of innovative proposals that were funded. I thought it was nice to get the opinion of someone “behind the scenes” regarding what makes a good grant proposal. We also talked to Dr. Vanni about what it is like to work for NSF while maintaining a lab at his home institution.”