news

Graduate student opportunities

I am taking application materials for prospective graduate students for the 2021-2022 school year. The official call can be found here.
If you are an interested prospective student, please follow the instructions, using my klsheehan@frostburg.edu email for all official correspondences. Incomplete applications or those who do not follow instructions properly will not be reviewed. 
Be sure to check out the FSU website to understand the benefits we offer to our graduate students, our expectations of them, and to what extent we can support you without additional financial aid.

Copepods in the news...

The copepods cultures (Apocyclops panamensis) are finally happy! We've found that they are pretty happy in our environmental chamber with minimal aeration and microalgae to eat. This week (mid-Mar 2021), we're exposing our cultures to microplastics to see how they respond. 

Seabird processing underway!

The Northern Fulmar specimens are yielding some really interesting information. Not only are we finding cool parasites and lots of plastic, but the bycaught birds are also apparently food items that are scavenged by pelagic amphipod species. 

COVID-19 Pauses 2020 progress

Ah, 2020, what a special time we had! With the risk if the virus our University went online and removed the ability of undergraduate research on campus. As a result, spring, summer, and intercession 2020 research was not possible. The good news? We can now pick things back up as infection risk and safety precautions are set in place. That means I can hire students summer 2021 to help on the same cool projects. See below for instructions on how to apply.

Research specimen

Special delivery of seabirds!
Working with NOAA's Alaska Longline Fishery program, I have just gotten a new shipment of Northern Fulmars (NOFU) that I will use to train undergraduate students at Frostburg State University on the methods of parasitology and plastic ecology.

Copepod cultures

Spring 2020, we will be collecting and keeping planktonic copepods in out environmental chambers. This will require cultures of their food (protozoans) and long-term maintenance of many generations of these tiny arthropods. I will be advertising for 4 paid undergraduate positions to help with this work over the summer of 2020 - so check back for more!