General

Three individuals pose at the top of an elevation.

INSPIRES Postdoc Profile: Melissa Pastore

By Stefania Irene Marthakis Melissa Pastore, global change ecologist and second-year postdoctoral associate in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and with the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, leads a team of collaborators from Vermont as well as Maine and New Hampshire in studying the global meteorological process called cold air-pooling—specifically […]

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Photo of Kati Corlew with text Kati Corlew & Barracuda: The Art of Storytelling in Science

Kati Corlew and Barracuda: The Art of Storytelling in Science

By Stefania Irene Marthakis Kati Corlew is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Faculty Coordinator of Civic Engagement at the University of Maine Augusta (UMA), Bangor campus. Corlew has also developed several courses on the study of qualitative research methods, community organizing, and more specifically, a Psychology of Disaster and Climate Change undergraduate course.   Further, […]

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Participating teachers pose for photo with sensor.

INSPIRES & the RiSE Center Partnership: STEM is a Community Collective

By Stefania Irene Marthakis  INSPIRES, an NSF EPSCoR RII Track-2 grant that focuses on gathering, analyzing, and utilizing data collected from across the Northern Forest Region, has partnered with the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (RiSE Center), an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Maine. The RiSE Center provides support for twenty-two […]

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Sydney Jackson stands to the right of her poster wearing a white jacket.

Maine-eDNA Undergraduate Student Sydney Jackson Tests eDNA Sampling Methods

By Caty DuDevoir, Maine EPSCoR Media Intern Maintaining the natural state of an ecological community better informs future research and avoids disrupting the species that are present. Environmental DNA (eDNA) provides researchers with a cost-effective way to prevent significant invasion of an ecosystem while still being able to collect useful data. Determining the efficiency of […]

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Heather Richard holds a bang with crushed strawberry and a solution to extract DNA in a zoom window.

Maine’s Mysterious Marshlands Workshop with Heather Richard

By Daniel Timmermann In person STEM education has been difficult the past couple years. Due to restrictions, bringing students into a lab was not an option and outdoor programs are obviously limited by weather. Maine’s Mysterious Marshlands: Using eDNA to Understand Climate Change, a recent workshop led by Maine-eDNA graduate student Heather Richard, sought to […]

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Maine-eDNA Undergraduate Summer Internships Open

Maine-eDNA program is seeking undergraduate student employees to join our team, a state-wide, multi-institutional initiative establishing Maine as a national leader in environmental monitoring, ecological understanding, and sustainability of coastal ecosystems (https://umaine.edu/edna/). The primary responsibility of the undergraduate employees will be to conduct field sampling at freshwater and marine sites, providing the opportunity for students […]

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Mainers with Maine-eDNA

by Daniel Timmermann The 5-Year NSF EPSCoR Funded Track-1 Maine-eDNA Grant seeks to transform our understanding and sustainability of Maine’s coastal ecosystems via environmental DNA (eDNA). Maine-eDNA currently supports 31 undergraduate students from across the state and since 2019 has supported 87 students from Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Saint Joseph’s, SMCC, UMaine, UMM, and USM. Below […]

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INSPIRES Team Profile: Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh

by Stefania Irene Marthakis  Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information Science at the University of Maine. Sekeh is also a Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (CDSE-MSS) NSF awardee as well as a researcher on the NSF EPSCoR RII […]

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The people stand talking in the woods as they work on a sensor mounted on a tripod

INSPIRES Team Profile: Thayer Whitney

by Stefania Irene Marthakis  Thayer Whitney is an undergraduate in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at the University of Maine, working towards a B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.  Whitney was initially drawn to the science programs at the University of Maine, but once he got here he discovered he was more inclined towards engineering. With […]

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