by Adam Hinterthuer
This year, from April to August, the CFL had the privilege of serving as the scientific home for Ricardo Taniwaki, a professor at Federal University of ABC in São Paulo, Brazil. Ricardo received a Fulbright Junior Faculty Member Award to study anywhere in the world and chose the shores of Lake Mendota “to work with Emily Stanley, because of her worldwide recognition [as an expert] on methane dynamics in streams, which is the topic of my current research.”
Ricardo made the most of his time working with Emily and the students in her lab, even publishing a paper entitled “Methane concentrations and fluxes in agricultural and preserved tropical headwater streams” in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The paper is the first to evaluate methane concentrations and fluxes in the most important region for sugarcane production in the world, Ricardo says, and it “stands alone for this type of data in the entire southeast region of Brazil.”
Ricardo thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the faculty, postdocs and students at the “most respected center for limnology in the world,” he says, noting that the experience was a “huge” improvement for his career.
But he didn’t just stick to science. The biggest highlight, he reports, was experiencing a bit of “true” winter up at Trout Lake Station and walking on a frozen lake which, “would never happen in Brazil.”
Ricardo also discovered that the first limnologist in Brazil was from the CFL, thanks to a conversation with the CFL’s unofficial historian (and director emeritus), John Magnuson. Stillman Wright, who was Chancey Juday’s first Ph.D student, is considered one of the founders of Brazilian limnology for his research there in the 1930s.
“After [learning] this, I felt that I was just in the best place that I could be to develop my career as a limnologist,” Ricardo says.