Luiza Alves

Undergraduate Fellow

“When I was in high school I volunteered at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a really great program and got me interested in the environment and sciences. It was all about educating the public about ocean conservation, climate change, and ocean acidification.

Now here I am, working on my own project in the Mangan Lab having to do with ecology and plant-soil feedbacks. Here it’s very much hands on, I would say nitty-gritty sciency stuff. We want to know how the fungicides being used on the mesocosms affect the plants. We want to know how fungicides behave in the field; we didn't want this study in the greenhouse.

I’m out here in the sun, mostly weeding and digging. Today I'm weed-whacking and I'll be tilling later. I'll be applying different fungicide treatments to see if there's a direct effect on plant growth.”

Luiza worked with with Scott Mangan and Claudia Stein's Natural Enemies team during summer 2018. Learn more about their plant-microbial communities research here.