Prospective Students

Potential Graduate Students

I am always looking for creative, bright and motivated graduate students. I plan to accept 1-2 students this year, depending on funding availability.

What do I expect out of you?

I expect you to be hard working, independent, and creative. I also expect you to be committed to and excited about your work. While a student here, you can expect to write grants, publish your work in refereed journals, make presentations at national meetings, work hard in the lab and field, have a good time, and learn how to be an ecologist.

What will you work on?

Most of my work is on microbial communities assemblages, and this is really the focus of the lab. However, we are also very interested in comparing microbial and "macrobial" communities, so your work does not have to be exclusively on microbes. I am primarily interested in community and population ecology and links to ecosystem ecology.

Please click here to learn more about Microbial Ecology and Evolution at the University of Washington.

How do you apply?

If you’re interested in working with me, please send me an email or letter. In it, please include as much of the following information as possible:

• an outline of possible research topics
• a summary of research experience
• a list of relevant coursework (with grades)
• contact information for three references (if available)
• general and advanced GRE test scores (if available)

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you do not yet have all this information together. The most important thing to do is to write to let me know you are interested. You must apply to the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences to become a graduate student in my lab. Please follow this link for more details about the SAFS application process: http://fish.washington.edu/graduates/admissions.html.

I also encourage you to apply for any graduate school fellowships for which you may qualify.  You might also want to read an article on applying for graduate school: How to Win a Graduate Fellowship.

• NSF - due November 
• National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS) Graduate Research Fellowship – due November
• NDSEG - due January
• NOAA Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarships - due Winter 
• Hertz Foundation Awards - due October 
• NASA GSRP - usually due between October and late January
• EPA STAR - due November 

If you still have questions, please feel free to contact me or Scott Schafer, schafer@u.washington.edu. Scott is our graduate programs coordinator for the SAFS. You can also go to the department webpage for prospective graduate students for more information.

Undergraduates

We have a number of projects in the lab that would be suitable for undergraduate research projects. Interest or experience with ecology, biostatstics or molecular biology lab techniques is a plus, but they are not required. If you are interested in ecology and are excited about doing research, then please contact me to talk about your interests and about joining the lab.

Capstone Opportunities

Please come talk to me if you are interested in doing your Capstone project in the Horner-Devine lab.

• Urban development and lake communities: How does urbanization microbial communities in likes and how does this impact the function of these systems? We have a set of samples from over 20 lakes in the Pacific Northwest that range from pristine to highly developed. This is a great opportunity to examine anthropogenic impacts on lakes through the window of the microbial world.
• Stressed out: The project in evolutionary ecology involves gathering and analyzing existing data to ask how the structure of microbial communities varies along gradients of stress. For example, are communities found in high stress environments comprised of individuals that are more closely related to one another than individuals in low stress environments?
• Living in the dead zone: Oxygen in Hood Canal, Washington, is often really low—low enough to cause fish kills. It is the microbes that are ultimately responsible for using most of this oxygen. If you are interested in exploring the role of microbes in this local ecosystem, there are lots of opportunities to for a capstone project.
• Invasive plants: to manage or not to manage? An invasive eelgrass co-occurs with a native eelgrass just north of us in Padilla Bay, Washington. We have a large project focused on studying the impact of this invasive species on the sediment microbial community and the processes these microbes mediate.
• Microbes & disease: We are exploring new work assessing the role of microbial communities in defending aquatic species from and making them vulnerable to disease.
• Millions of microbes: We have some large datasets of sequence data that present a suite of exciting opportunities to use your programming and bioinformatics skills to explore microbial ecology. How do rare and dominant communities differ from one another? How do sampling constrains influence the ecological patterns we observe?

What do you need to do to find out about joining the lab?

All you have to do is send me an email or come see me. We can talk about what you would like to get out of working in the lab, and we'll go from there.

Why should you join the lab?

If you interested in ecology or microbes, it makes sense to start getting into some research. If you think you'd like to go to graduate school, then it is a very good idea to have some research experience before you apply. Doing research as an undergraduate is also a great way to figure out what you are really interested before you going to grad school.

What would you do once you're here?

We do a combination of field work, lab work and data analysis. Right now most of the field work is local, so it should be relatively easy for an undergraduate to get some experience in the field during the school year. You might also be interested in developing your own project.

So if you're interested in working in the Horner-Devine lab, please send an email to me at mchd@u.washington.edu. I look forward to hearing from you.