Biology/Microbiology/Biochemistry Research Opportunities
The below list contains profiles of USGS scientists who are looking for interns to assist with their research in the areas of biology, microbiology, biochemistry, and adjacent fields of study. Interested students should reach out to the individual researcher via the contact information provided.
Stephen Formel, Biologist, Node Manager GBIF-US/OBIS-USA
Contact: sformel@usgs.gov
I am the US node manager for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF-US) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS-USA). Both GBIF and OBIS are international networks and data platforms funded by the world's governments. They strongly support open science and are aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. I represent the US scientific community in these efforts. My daily work includes synthesizing, publishing, and facilitating access to species occurrence data and analyses of species trends, drivers of change, and potential implications of future changes in biodiversity in the United States. Lastly, I help educate the US scientific community at large in the biological standards, like Darwin Core and Ecological Metadata Language (EML), and practices, necessary to accomplish Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and Open data. All of my work depends on the tools of data science, and programming languages like R, and python.
Tabitha Graves, Spatial Wildlife Biologist
Contact: tgraves@usgs.gov
I evaluate the effects of stressors on wildlife habitat, distributions, disease, and demographics using spatially-explicit approaches, large datasets, and tools including genetics, remote sensing, hierarchical models, climate models, and GPS collars. Current project subjects include huckleberries, bumblebees, chronic wasting disease, bighorn, mountain goats, mule deer, elk, black bears, and grizzly bears.