Although I still have some catching up to do with sharing my adventures from yesterday’s NASA Social, Blogging Forum, and Open Mic Night, this “event” at AGU gets its own special post.

Meet the Gilbert-Guertin-King family!

Wednesday morning in the AGU Poster Hall (from left to right) Lisa Gilbert, Laura Guertin, Daniel King.      Photo taken by Jill Singer.

OK, so you know who I am.  To the right is my husband, Daniel King, who teaches chemistry at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  His poster is right behind him and describes the results of a National Science Foundation project where he and his colleagues are developing POGIL activities on climate science for the chemistry classroom. POGIL stands for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning and uses guided inquiry to engage students during class time in their learning.  Dan and I met back in graduate school at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science – long before either of us knew that we’d both end up doing research on best teaching practices in introductory-level college science courses!

To the left is Lisa Gilbert, someone with the same initials as I have (LAG) and also has a PhD in marine geology & geophysics like I do (but from Univ. of Washington).  Lisa is my sister-in-law, married to Dan’s younger brother Rich, a published author and specialist in maritime literature (there’s a little bit of the sea in all of us!).  Lisa teaches in the Williams-Mystic Program in Connecticut and was presenting about her work with GARNET (Geoscience Affective Research Network).

I’m sure there are other cases of multiple family members presenting at AGU, and the three of us have all been at the same AGU conferences in the past, but what makes this occasion unique is that Dan and Lisa have their posters right next to each other!  Neither of them knew they were submitting abstracts to the same session, so what are the odds of not only being in the same session, but having their posters right next to one another???  (note that there are 2,834 posters on display today, and five days of poster sessions)  My poster is tomorrow, and ironically, my poster is in a session and right next to a former undergraduate student of mine, Abbey Dufoe (of the blog Environmental Explorations).

Celebrating science with family makes AGU just that much more special – and fun!