Michelle Chamberlain

Congratulations to Chiron Anderson on his PhD Defense Seminar!!! Leaves as a legend and Dr.

Zackry Stevenson received funding from the NSF in support of an internship at the US Geological Survey to distinguish between mercury mobilized during wildfires and mining activities to determine the source of in-stream mercury to Napias Creek and tributaries through water sample

Zackry Stevenson and Michelle Chamberlain of the Swanner lab both received grants from the Itasca Biological Research Station’s Director’s Fellowship and John Tester Graduate Research Fund for their research in Deming Lake, Minnesota. Congratulations!

It's release day for #NerdNite book, #HowtoWinFriendsandInfluenceFungi!! I had the amazing opportunity to illustrate this book and was given a HUGE amount of creative freedom. I'm going to share what went into creating each one. Order your copy here: static.macmillan.com/static/…

Feb 14, 1990: Voyager 1 spacecraft takes this stunning photograph of the Earth suspended in the sunbeam. Carl Sagan's brilliant monologue as mentioned in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: 'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.' 📷NASA