Jennifer Van Wagoner
B.S. Plant and Soil Sciences
Horticulture
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26506-6058

After graduating from WVU in May of 1997, I returned to Cleveland where my family lives. During the summer, I worked as an intern for the Cleveland Botanical Garden, where I taught gardening programs to inner city children and aided the library staff with their extensive botanical and horticultural holdings.

In October, my internship ended and I moved back to Morgantown to take a Research Assistant position with INVAM. Even though I have been here only a short while so far, I have learned a lot about how to work with mycorrhizal fungi. Picking out those tiny spores with a pipette is just as hard as it sounds.

Another task which Dr. Morton has assigned to me is organize INVAM's holdings of mycorrhizal literature stored in filing cabinets in the lab for easy access to all, to incorporate information important to INVAM, such as the names of experimental organisms used in each published study, into our bibliographic database, Reference Manager (Research Information Systems), and to visit other libraries and obtain articles not available at WVU. One important outcome of this work is close tracking of papers which have cited INVAM germplasm or services, which then are listed on this web site.

When I'm not in the lab, I enjoy playing with my dog Biggs. She's a very sweet dog who loves to play catch and to go for long walks in the woods. I also enjoy swimming. I have been on a swim team since I was seven years old; I currently swim with the Mountaineer Masters Aquatic Club.

I have since left INVAM, I worked at Longwood Gardens, Delaware and have since applied for graduate school at several institutions.