Allie Caughman needed to step away from her studies for a little while, so she chose to listen to the new College of Sciences podcast, ScienceMatters.
"I listened to it in my room as a quick break from some homework," Caughman says.
That decision led to her becoming the winner of the Episode 4 quiz, and the latest inductee into the ScienceMatters Hall of Fame.
Caughman had a special reason for tuning in the podcast. "This week's episode was by a postdoc in Dr. Stewart's lab, so I especially wanted to make sure I listened to it," Caughman says.
That postdoctoral researcher in Episode 4 is Nastassia Patin. Caughman has worked in Stewart's lab for the past two years. She is a third year undergraduate student studying for a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences. Stewart is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, runs the Marine Microbiology @Georgia Tech lab, and is a member of the Parker H. Petit Insitute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
ScienceMatters Episode 4 features the work that Patin did with Stewart on a study of the microbiome in the Georgia Aquarium's large Ocean Voyager exhibit.
The quiz question was: What is the name of the Georgia Aquarium sea turtle mentioned in Episode 4? The answer is Tank.
Caughman is focusing on microbiomes in her own research. "Starting this summer I began working on my own project on how the coral reef microbiome changes throughout a daily cycle." She received a Presidents Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) to help fund her project into the fall. "The goal of the project is to see what the microbial communities in the corals look like, and how stable or dynamic the communities are over a shorter time scale than many other studies have examined."
Caughman is from Cartersville, Georgia.
This week's episode 5 of ScienceMatters is "Visualizing the Birth of Galaxies" with John Wise, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics.
If you would like to join the ScienceMatters Hall of Fame, enter the answer to this question: What is the name of the University of Illinois supercomputer mentioned in Episode 5 that John Wise uses for visualizations and simulations?
Submit your answer by 11 a.m. Monday, September 24, at sciencematters.gatech.edu.
