Spring and fall of 2017, I was involved with a wonderful group of people within the Office of University Writing (OUW) at Auburn as an ePortfolio ambassador. My task as an ambassador was to give presentations to various organizations and groups on campus about the usefulness of developing professional student websites for jobs, graduate school applications and internships. Having already developed one of my own and with an international conference on the horizon that the OUW was scheduled to host, I was asked to co-write and deliver a panel presentation at the International Writing Across the Curriculum conference that was held on campus, June 4-7, 2018. Our presentation focused on several key aspects and benefits of the integration of eportfolios as a tool of overall student success. Among those components were reflection, critical thinking skills, enhancing written communication, technical competency and facilitation of learning outside of the classroom. All of these qualities are important to potential schools and employers in this technical age, and individuals are likely to stand out amongst their peers with the added skill set that developing an eportfolio will grant them. Together with program administrator Heather Stuart and program assistant Megan Haskins, we drafted and gave a panel that discussed the positive qualities and universal appeal of eportfolios in academia, and how they can help the modern student. The presentation is entitled "ePortfolios: A Professionalizing Addition to Student Learning", and is available via the link to the left.
I was a graduate assistant in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University. From 2015-2016, I helped the department with STEM middle and high school classroom lesson preparation and teacher training. The idea behind the work was to spread inquiry-based science lessons to under-resourced and rural school systems in Alabama that did not have access to STEM materials and lesson plans, and to also prepare current and future science educators for an ever-changing scientific world.
In the summer of 2015, a week-long, professional development workshop for science and math teachers statewide was held on Auburn's campus. There, teachers in attendance received training for several different lesson plan kits devised by departmental faculty, complete with pre and post tests to assess teacher understanding of the materials. I assisted with the training and provided technological support for those in attendance. The experience was new to me—I was up in front of career educators, explaining and helping, as opposed to my usual seat at a desk. I also corresponded with participating teachers before and after the training in order to obtain student pre and post test data so that teaching and learning objectives could be assessed. The entire week was a unique experience, from learning how and how not to properly plan workshops, to materials preparedness, to collecting human data. I was and am grateful for the opportunity to help expand science teaching for the next generation of Alabama teachers and students.
Gulf of Mexico Meiofauna Research
Returning a bewildered ray back into the Gulf of Mexico (10/18/2011)
Sunrise on the Gulf of Mexico (10/24/2011)
Salvinia Research
Hamdani and Ghazal (2009)
(image from livefins.com)
Junior year (Spring 2009), I joined Dr. Frank A. Romano's lab to work on a multi-year survey project that he had begun in 2007, examining meiofauna taxa richness and abundance in the northern Gulf of Mexico. This project took his work and myself from the lab on campus to the Mississippi coast, the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico and even to Belgium, expanding the knowledge base of the Gulf benthos in the process. This intensive, multi-year sample regime was one of the first of its kind to examine yearly fluctuations of a benthic marine environment, combining population dynamics and associated factors, such as time, longitudinal space and sediment composition, to paint a clearer picture of the meiobenthic populations of the northern Gulf of Mexico.
The work I assisted with from junior year forward unto graduate school would form the focus of my thesis project. After finishing my undergraduate program, I became a graduate research assistant in the Romano lab, tasked with leading our sample collection efforts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), transportation and lab analysis of those samples. Each fall from 2009 to 2011, I helped lead the JSU research team, consisting of faculty and students from the biology and the physical and earth sciences departments, out to collect Gulf samples with NOAA on their yearly pelagic surveys. We would be out at sea for 3 to 5 weeks, hauling in giant net catches, identifying and counting everything we found, eating the freshest (literally from net to tummy) seafood possible and surviving sea storms that would make Gilligan's look like an early morning mist. Alongside NOAA scientists, we gathered and processed our samples onboard the research ships and at the lab at JSU, including meiofauna taxa identification, enumeration and granulometric analysis. This information, along with spatial and other abiotic data, would form the bulk of our data collection for all 5 years of the survey.
One of the neater aspects of this work was getting to present posters and give talks at all sorts of related meetings, at our university to across the pond. I had never given a talk or presented a poster until these opportunities, and it was cool knowing that our work tied into other similar studies and was relevant to the scientific world. I am currently revising a manuscript for publication consideration and most recently presented findings in the Spring of 2017 at the Association of Southeastern Biologists conference and Benthic Ecology conference. Past meiofauna presentations and posters are listed in the folder to the upper left.
Sophomore year (Spring 2008) at Jacksonville State, I worked on a project assessing responses of Salvinia minima to different light and temperature regimes. The purpose was to determine the feasibility of using Salvinia to remediate freshwater sources that had been contaminated with heavy metals and pollutants.
I grew the plants and conducted the experiments. The plants were grown under various light intensities and temperatures and the effects on growth, chlorophyll and photosynthesis recorded. This work should prove helpful to botanists looking for a moderately tolerant water-surface plant to use for phytoremediation of freshwater sources contaminated with heavy metals, paper plant runoff pollution or pesticides.
The work I helped to complete resulted in a personal first: a scientific publication. I officially became a scientist! It was submitted to and accepted by the American Fern Journal, a quarterly published by the American Fern Society. The finished product is entitled "Selected Physiological Responses of Salvinia minima to Various Temperatures and Light Intensities", and is available via the link to the left.