Yokogawa Fluid Imaging Technologies is pleased to announce the return of our Student Equipment Grant Program in 2020. Learn how to apply to win the use of a free FlowCam to conduct your research more quickly and efficiently. Keep reading below to learn about one student's experience participating in the program in 2011.
Karen received the 2011 FlowCam grant as a master’s student at San Francisco State University for her research on copepod feeding dynamics in the San Francisco Estuary.
“The summer I got the award I was about to start the second year of my masters program and had designed an exciting but complicated experiment to measure the phytoplankton prey of an herbivorous copepod,” Karen wrote. “The problem with my experiment was that I needed to rapidly enumerate and identify phytoplankton in up to 48 individual bottles, and I only had a couple of hours to find out what was in the bottles before the rapid growth rates of the phytoplankton would throw off my results. The FlowCam saved me and made this quick work possible! Days or months later I could use the software to verify the automatic sorting, categorize the harder-to-identify particles, and use the data on abundance and size to publish my results!” Karen’s work was published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series in 2017.
Today Karen is an Environmental Program Manager at the Delta Science Program in the San Francisco area. She leads a team of five scientists working to support the use of science in planning for ecosystem restoration and water management projects in the Delta. For more about Karen’s work, check out @KarenKayfetz on Twitter!
