September 2024: We are thrilled that Julian’s proposal to JGI’s 2025 CSP program was selected! This will give us the ability to generate a ton of amazing ‘omics data from Fayetteville Green Lake, primarily to study uncultivated archaea in the deep anoxic ‘monimolimnion’ layer of the water column.
This means we will be generating mountains of metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, metabolomic, and single-cell genome data, both from in situ lake samples and from BONCAT-FACS incubations to assess translational activity. In addition to the folks at the JGI, collaborators on this project are Mike McCormick (Hamilton College) and Bryn Durham (University of Florida). Mike has been studying Green Lake microbes and chemistry for two decades. Bryn is helping with everything related to metabolomes, and will probably have a lot to say about sulfur in the lake. Julian has been collaborating with Mike on Green Lake projects since 2020, and it’s a DREAM to be able to get this much sequencing data out of the lake! We can’t wait to see what sorts of projects come out of this work in the next few years.
RECENT LAB NEWS
July 2025: Big changes happening! After 6 years at liberal arts colleges, Julian and the lab are moving to Riverkeeper. The lab is now part of Riverkeeper’s water quality lab, located at the Hudson Maritime Museum in Kingston, NY. The focus of the lab remains the same - studying water quality in rivers, streams, estuaries, and the coastal ocean, with a focus on nutrients, biogeochemistry, microbes, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. Instead of being part of an academic department, this work now continues through Riverkeeper. The biggest change is no teaching (for Julian) and a focus on the Hudson River Estuary and its tributaries.
If you are interested in collaborating, particularly if it’s useful to get samples from across the (entire!) Hudson River, its estuary, or its tributaries, don’t hesitate to reach out!
The lab can still take undergraduate students, but it is a little more complicated. However, Riverkeeper can facilitate research internships, so it is definitely possible! Contact Julian with inquiries about this - we are always excited to talk to students interested in our work, and will try our hardest to get work things out! We are also hoping to obtain grant funding for internships/research students, technicians, and postdoctoral researchers, so stay tuned.
The view from the new lab! Looking east along Rondout Creek.
June 2024: Julian, Nick Miller (‘26), and Angie Dalle Mule (‘27) presented a variety of metagenomics-based projects at the 2024 NEMPET meeting! It was a weekend full of microbiology and lake swimming.
Nick and Angie presenting posters on freshwater pyrophosphatase genes and Patescibacterial genomics, respectively.
June 2024: Julian and Reilan Garczynski (‘26) presented at the 2024 ASLO summer meeting in Madison, WI! Reilan presented a poster on her work using metagenomics to study the global ecology of freshwater archaea; Julian gave a talk on nitrogen-fixing microbes in freshwater ecosystems, and co-chaired a session on aquatic microbial ecology. We miss the cheese curds and Spotted Cow already.
Not a bad place for an aquatic science conference…
May 2024: First year at Hamilton in the books! There will be a great crop of summer students in the lab, most starting in a couple weeks, and a few of us are getting ready to present at a couple upcoming conferences!
As the first part of a busy field season, Julian helped sample along the Mohawk River for fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) as part of a long-term project with Riverkeeper, SUNY Cobleskill, and Union College. And he filtered some water for nitrogen, of course. More info about the Mohawk FIB project can be found here.
Bacteria food from the IDEXX kits slowly dissolving…
February 2024: New semester, new faces!
All four students from the lab last semester are now abroad, but we were joined by Oliver, Zach, Albert, Reilan, Lil, Paige, and Rasikh, who will be working on a multitude of projects including N biogeochemistry, fecal source tracking, comparative metagenomics, and flow cytometry.
Nov. 2023: More antimicrobial resistance!
Julian is a co-author on a new publication detailing the effects of wastewater treatment plants on antibiotic resistance in streams. This is another paper from a large collaboration with the USDA, the University of Georgia, the EPA, and the University of North Georgia. Congrats to Gabi Cho for pulling the analyses and paper together!
July 2023: We moved! After 4 great years at Utica University, the lab moved to the Biology Department at Hamilton College.
