About the Lab
Lab mission and focus
Planktonic communities are wonderfully diverse. The work in ZEAL focuses on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics that shape this diversity, and the interactions between ecology, physiology, and adaptation in a changing climate. We aim to integrate different approaches and bridge between field observations and laboratory experiments to investigate the mechanisms underlying spatial and temporal patterns in natural populations.
Work in the lab focuses on the effects of temperature on pelagic copepods, some of the most abundant animals in aquatic systems. Current themes are thermal limits, physiological ecology, spatiotemporal patterns in thermal adaptation, and eco-evolutionary interactions (see the Research page).
The text above is taken from the website homepage and research page. Expand it into a mission statement.
Possible content:
- What the lab wants to achieve over the next 5-10 years
- The kinds of questions the lab is (and isn’t) a good home for
- How the lab’s work connects to the broader department and community
Annual schedule
| When | What |
|---|---|
| End of Summer | Summer report due Update your IDP Matt gives “State of the Lab” update |
| October | Department Retreat |
| December | Term Reports due |
| March/April | UMass Lowell Student Research Symposium |
| May | Term Reports due |
Lab history
A running timeline of the lab. New milestones get added each year during the handbook review.
| When | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Before ZEAL | Matt completes his PhD at the University of Connecticut, then works as an NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vermont |
| January 2025 | The lab officially opens at UMass Lowell |
| Spring 2025 | First semester of undergraduate researchers. |
| Summer 2025 | First PhD student joins the lab. |
| July 2025 | Fieldwork in northwestern Poland begins a new collaborative project on freshwater copepod diversity and thermal limits |
| March 2026 | ZEAL and the Gignoux-Wolfsohn Lab receive a Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game Community Biodiversity Grant to study oyster reef biodiversity on the North Shore |
| 2026 | With Jana Isanta-Navarro and Lynn Govaert, ZEAL launches the Distributed Aquatic Response Experiments (DARE) Network at the ASLO-SIL meeting in Montreal |