Welcome to the Ward Lab
The research lab of Naomi Ward is found within the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming.
Naomi is also affiliated with the Department of Botany and Program in Ecology.
We are located in Laramie, Wyoming.
Our general research interests:
- Microbial community structure and function
- Interactions between microbes and their environment
- Evolution of new function in microbial genomes
News:
07/30/12-08/03/12: The Ward Lab and the UW Science and Mathematics Teaching Center (SMTC) hosts six Wyoming high-school science teachers for the NSF-supported GET Cell Biology workshop.
06/06/12-06/10/12: Naomi serves as organizer of the scientific program at the 56th Annual Wind River Conference on Prokaryotic Biology, an amazing small meeting for everything bacterial. Lots of opportunities for grad student and post doc participation through support from the US National Science Foundation. Graduate student Ekaterina Yarunova will present her work on transcription and translation in the unusually compartmentalized bacterium Gemmata obscuriglobus.
05/09/12: Naomi speaks as a panelist at "Beyond the Hype: Teaching Critical Thinking in the 21st Century", a Spring Colloquium run by the UW Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning
05/07/12: Naomi visits the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Dartmouth University to give a research seminar
03/04/12-03/09/12: Naomi attends the Keystone Symposium on the Microbiome, and presents the lab's work on the microbiome in Hirschsprung's Disease
01/09/12: UW undergraduate researcher Patrick LaBreck joins the Ward Lab to work on the Hirschsprung's Disease microbiome project
08/22/11: Naomi starts co-Chairing Admissions for the Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences (MCLS) PhD program, together with Jay Gatlin.
08/22/11: Start of the 2012 Fall Semester, and Naomi's new class in Microbial Diversity and Ecology. Designed to provide students first-hand experience in multiple aspects of microbial ecology research, including field sampling, cultivation-dependent and cultivation--independent approaches to studying microbial diversity, and just enough bioinformatics to be dangerous! Thanks to the folks responsible for "I, Microbiologist" for a great hybrid textbook-lab manual.
07/26/11: Daryl leaves the Ward lab (with Master's degree in hand) to enter a PhD program at the University of Vienna, working with Dr Matthias Horn. Bon voyage, Daryl!
06/21/11: Blaire and Naomi publish a pyrosequencing study of freshwater planctomycetes in "Aquatic Microbial Ecology"
06/01/11: Ekaterina (Katia) Yarunova joins the Ward lab as an MCLS PhD student to work on the Gemmata project. Welcome, Katia!
05/16/11: Olga joined Summer Internship Program at J. Craig Venter Institute.
Featured Lecture:
Michael Specter - The Danger of Science Denialism
