Congratulations to Halima Malal and Lauren Picone for earning best conference poster awards! Halima presented her work ‘Short-term effects of organic amendment produced from vermifiltration on soil health and crop performance of an annual crop‘ at the 9th International Symposium on Soil Organic Matter, which tool plane in Marrakech, Morocco.
The summer season is starting out strong with several ongoing field sampling campaigns. On June 27th our team visited the Local Ecology and Agriculture Fremont (aka LEAF) to talk about soil biodiversity in urban soils and to take soil samples of their 3 gardens to understand what effects regenerative agricultural practices have had in the soil over time. This effort was lead by Dr. Joshua Garcia and with support of cooperative extension specialist Dr. Kayode Jegede.
The samples will be analyzed over the upcoming weeks for the abundance and diversity of nematodes, artropods, and microorganisms. We are excited to work alongside LEAF and support their educational mission to connect with the land through regenerative agriculture and learn to become stewards of the Earth. You can read more about this visit here.
Dr. Lazcano participated in the most recent edition of the SAVOR lecture on Food and Wine. This time the lecture was focused on regenerative agriculture and how it can help with mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Dr Lazcano was accompanied by Ivo Jeramaz, Winemaker and Vice President of Vineyards & Production at Grgich Hills Estate, Linda Burch, CEO of the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education and Regenerative Agriculture, and Jessica Chiartas, President and Lead Scientist at RegenScore. The Savor lecture series, co-organized by the Robert Mondavi Institute and the UC Davis Library, hosts thought leaders, entrepreneurs, policy makers and scientific experts for evenings of illuminating discussion on some of the biggest topics in food and wine being studied at UC Davis today.
PhD student Sarah Brickman and postdoctoral researcher Nall Moonillal have been honored with the highest recognition on campus for their outstanding role in mentoring undergraduate research. This award celebrates their exceptional contributions to guiding undergraduate students in research and/or creative activities.
During the Winter of 2024, Sarah and Nall spearheaded a comprehensive professional development series for their undergraduate mentees. This program involved weekly meetings featuring tailored activities aimed at providing students with a solid theoretical foundation in their research area, alongside the essential skills necessary for effective research presentations. The series covered diverse topics such as navigating scientific literature, analyzing and discussing findings from scholarly articles, processing and evaluating laboratory data, creating visual representations, refining presentation techniques, and crafting research posters.
Vivian Liu (left) and Ivy Israel (right) present the results of their research projects at the Winter 2024 Lazcano Lab research symposium.
The culmination of this professional development initiative was a research symposium where the undergraduate researchers showcased their findings. Remarkably, two of the students went on to present their work at the prestigious UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference.
Ivy and Zack, undergraduate students in Environmental Management and Restoration and Sustainable Agricultural Systems respectively, presented their research project at the 35th UC Davis Annual Undergraduate Research Scholarship and Creative Activities Conference. Their work, which investigates the connections between soil C and water cycling in vineyards of the Napa Valley, was very well received by the participants of the conference. This work culminates several months of hard work, starting with a long sampling campaign across 16 vineyards in Napa and following with an extensive suite of laboratory soil physical and chemical analysis. Zack and Ivy were supervised by Dr. Nall Moonillal (postdoctoral scholar) and Sarah Brickmam (graduate student in Soils and Biogeochemistry). We feel extremely proud and happy to have such brilliant students in the team.
Bruna Vaz presented her work on vineyard deep soil C at the CCarbon Soil Health Symposium at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Bruna visited the Lazcano lab for 6 months in 2022 and worked side by side with PhD candidate Connie Wong, investigating how C gets stored in vineyard subsoils (30-100 cm depth). Bruna recently started a graduate program in Ecology at Unicamp, working with landscape ecology, with professor Simone Aparecida Vieira. Way to go Bruna!
