(The following information is taken from the full RFP which is attached here) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces a funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program. The Foundation seeks to further the development of talented early stage Ph.D. scientists and engineers through the Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Postdoctoral …
After 1.5 years of collection events, culturing, identification, and selection of candidates our space microbes experiment finally is in orbit. Our 48 microbes, collected from a variety of built environments on earth, are now whipping around the planet. The rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral at 3:25pm EST yesterday. In a …
Great article from Brooke Borel writing for NOVA Online, “Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals?”. This covers some of the background of microbiology in hospitals, discusses work by both the BioBE Center and microBEnet… and of course the Hospital Microbiome Project as well as the NICU study from Jill Banfield’s lab. The article …
Not sure how I feel about this one so I’m going to just throw it out there for discussion. It’s a hand sanitizer built into a hospital door, on the theory that since compliance is apparently problem in hospitals they should make it part of a motion that people are doing anyway (e.g. opening doors). …
Looks like there will be a great symposium on the Microbiology of the Built Environment this year. The symposium is organized by Filipa Godoy-Vitorino and Sarah Preheim. Speakers include several Sloan-funded labs (including Maria Dominguez-Bello, James Meadow, and Mark Hernandez) and it looks to cover a wide range of cool topics. Check out the video below:
Yesterday was to have been the day that our collection of 48 microbes, collected from built environments around the country, were to blast off into space and try growing in microgravity. This would be followed by swabbing of the space station performed by the astronauts. We plan to analyze these swabs using bacterial, archaeal, and …
From the start, Project MERCCURI has involved classrooms and students in the process of citizen science. Many of our samples were collected by students and the microbes going into space from JPL were voted on by a number of high-school classrooms. Now we have a “Project MERCCURI Educator’s Guide” which contains a detailed overview of …
Microbial Ecology Research Tech position (for application details go here) The Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon currently has an opening for a full time Research Assistant to work in the area of microbial ecology. The successful candidate will play a key role in the Biology and Built Environment (BioBE) Center (http://biobe.uoregon.edu/), …
Bioinformatics/Microbial Ecology postdoctoral position (for application details go here) Jessica Green and Brendan Bohannan are currently seeking a bioinformatics postdoctoral researcher to explore fundamental questions in microbial ecology and evolution. Applicants should have a PhD with extensive training using bioinformatics to understand the ecology and/or evolution of complex biological communities, and strong writing skills. The ideal candidate will have …
A quick post here describing a Gizmodo article highlighting some of the Sloan-funded MBE research presented at the recent AAAS Symposium on Microbiomes of the Built Environment. It talks about work by both Mark Hernandez and Amy Pruden on different aspect of plumbing microbiomes.