“I’m originally from Massachusetts. When I was an undergrad at Stonehill College, I did behavioral ecology research with guppies and studied the impacts of anthropogenic light pollution on darkling beetles. In my two gap years, I switched gears and went to work in a cancer lab. But for graduate school, I knew I wanted to do more climate change research and that I wanted to move out West.

I looked at the top ecology programs in the West and emailed a bunch of PIs (principal investigators) to see if they were interested in taking a student. Jody Reimer, a professor of biology and mathematics at the University of Utah, got back to me. We had a 30-minute Zoom call scheduled for us to get to know each other and to see if I would be a good fit for her lab. The short Zoom call turned into an hour; we really got along, and she had the exact mentorship style and expertise I was looking for.

I knew nothing about Great Salt Lake. All I knew was that Salt Lake had a lake. Professor Reimer floated the idea of studying Great Salt Lake to me because she was interested in extreme environments and how organisms adapt to living in those environments. Microbialites are organo-sedimentary structures that live on and around the shoreline of Great Salt Lake and other saline lakes around the world. Microbialites host a biofilm of different microorganisms that live on top of this carbonate structure. The biofilm is super critical to the entire ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake, but as the water levels rapidly recede, they have become exposed and are drying out. This disrupts their crucial contributions to the Great Salt Lake ecosystem.

My work builds on findings by Dr. Carie Frantz, a biology professor at Weber State University who has shown partial microbialite recovery after a desiccation event.

For my work, I collected microbialite samples and lake water from the lake and put them in tanks with a number of treatments that will be able to disentangle the recovery process of Great Salt Lake microbialites.

My project aims to determine if they can ever make a full recovery and exactly how that recovery process occurs. The experiment lasts a year and a half. I’m hoping that having such a long study period will allow us to see a trajectory towards the original healthy microbial community.

When I moved here, I knew absolutely no one. My first friends were my cats. I immediately adopted two cats after moving here, Binx and Tate, from Best Friends. They’re the loves of my life. In my free time, I love hanging out with them. I also love to crochet, go camping, watch horror movies, and dance.

I have lots of tattoos to commemorate my research projects. I had this one first. It is a beetle with some red petunias to honor my undergraduate research. These are guppies and zebrafish. And these are microbialites. I’m really attached to both the organisms I study and the research I’ve done that’s led me here.

I hope that my work leads to helping make some crucial water management decisions so we can finally get towards restoring the lake or at least find some way to conserve the lake at what it is right now. As for career goals, I want to be involved in environmental policy. I want to continue doing research, but I want my findings to be used to make decisions that will help better wherever I am next.”

— Lauren Whelton is a fourth-year doctoral student in biology and mathematics