Bozeman Grinnellian Dinner
The Office of Development and Alumni Relations and Shannon Hinsa-Leasure, associate professor of Biology invites you to connect with students and other Grinnellians in the Bozeman area. Shannon is traveling to Montana with the students in her microbiology class over fall break and will be meeting with Mike Neeley ’84, chair of the Anthropology and Sociology department at Montana State University.
On Monday, October 16, Shannon has planned for the group to have dinner with Mike and the other scientists they meet that day. We are inviting the Grinnell alumni in the area to join Shannon and the students for dinner. We’re excited about this opportunity to connect alumni with current students during their trip and hope you will join the dinner as our guest!
5:30 p.m. Monday, October 16
Montana Ale Works
611 E. Main Street
Bozeman, MT 59715
Please let Anna Halpin-Healy '13, assistant director of alumni relations for regional programs, know if you will be able to attend and if you have any dietary restrictions by Monday, October 9. Anna is available by email at halpinhe2@grinnell.edu and by phone at 641-269-3186.
More information from Shannon about this exciting travel experience
The purpose of this travel is to bring Microbiology students to Montana State and Yellowstone National Park to interact with experts who are working to understand the microbial communities and networks of the microbial mats found in Yellowstone National Park. In recent years this class has taken a human health approach to studying the field of microbiology and this coming year I would like to expand those horizons to study environmental microbiology through the lens of thermal microbial mats. As a graduate student I traveled to the arctic to work on extreme microbes in cold environments and no amount of reading papers prepares you for the true experience of seeing the environment in person, for me it changed the trajectory of my career. I am hoping this trip may have a similar impact on some of our students. I have received an education permit for our trip which will allow us to do outlined tests and measurements at several sites within the park. We will spend the first seven weeks of the semester preparing for this trip by learning general principles of microbiology and reading primary literature on current research being conducted at the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University. In groups, students will become experts on different sites we will visit during our trip and give oral presentations before the trip to launch us into our trip. Upon returning to Iowa, we will conduct studies on water systems in our area utilizing some of the techniques we studied and employed in Yellowstone.