Fieldwork in Forks

By Amanda Manaster, PhD Student, University of Washington Civil & Environmental Engineering

Summer is one of the busiest times for scientists doing field work, and I’m no exception—I get out to the field regularly during the summer. At the end of June, I was in Forks, Washington calibrating tipping buckets for my research project.

In the world of freshwater, I’m interested in sediment (mud) transport (movement). For the sediment to move anywhere, you need some sort of driving force, and, in the case of my research, that driving force is water.

To understand the process of sediment transport, quantifying the amount of sediment and the amount of water is incredibly important. This is where the tipping buckets come in! In our field set up, the tipping buckets are placed on a platform on the hillslope below the road surface (along with a sediment tub and a turbidity tank), and water is routed through the tipping buckets, so we can get a measurement of the flow.

The tipping buckets work like this:

1. Water goes in through the top of the tipping bucket
2. One side of the bucket is filled until it tips over
3. The other side of the bucket is filled until it tips over
4. Repeat

Inside the tipping bucket, we have a tip counter. We take the number of tips multiplied by the amount of water it takes to tip, and voilà! We have the quantity of water we were looking for.

I spent my week at the end of June calibrating the tipping buckets (i.e., determining how much water it takes for the tipping buckets to tip). To do this, we used a fire truck (which I got to ride in!) with an attached flow meter and spent hours (and hours and hours…) counting tips, doing basic math, and lifting heavy sheet metal boxes.

Though it may sound boring and monotonous (which, honestly, it could be at times), I still firmly believe that a bad day in the field is better than any day in the office.

Happy field-working!

Ground-Truthing “Greenness” in Arctic Lakes

By Catherine Kuhn, PhD Student, University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences

Imagine a vast flatness stretching in all directions. Now fill that space with bird songs, the rustling of bull rushes, and the drone of a float plane vanishing into the distance. In July 2018, I found myself perched on the edge of a lake in the Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge with a pile of gear at my feet, watching the tiny dot of the plane disappear south into the foothills of the Crazy Mountains.

Our group had come to the Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge as part of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), a 10-year field experiment to understand the fate of permafrost release in a warming world. David Butman (UW), two USGS collaborators, and I were dropped by floatplane at a remote cabin in the middle of the Flats to investigate the role arctic lakes play in biogeochemical feedbacks in this changing landscape.

Between 1,400 to 1,850 billion metric tons of carbon (1)are locked up in the soils of the circumpolar North, which is almost twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere (2). At the project’s start, the prevailing understanding was that lakes acted as reactors, processing and releasing previously frozen carbon from permafrost soils into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. As the Arctic continues to warm at a rate double the global average, this creates a positive feedback loop that accelerates climate change (3).

However, new research published by our group and others this year in Nature Climate Change (4,5),suggests the majority of these lakes are cycling mostly modern carbon. My work explores how spatially synchronous lakes are across the landscape by linking field measurements of productivity to satellite remote sensing.

Regardless of carbon source, arctic lakes experience seasonal boom-and-bust cycles of productivity.  Preliminary research from our group shows a strong link between rates of gross primary productivity and satellite observations of lake color. Every summer, lakes change color as they warm and fill up with life. Flying over the lakes, the colors are striking and can provide clues into ecological conditions. One lake might be pea-soup green from cyanobacteria while its neighbor is yellow-brown from mats of submerged aquatic plants.

The lakes are remote; summer access is by float plane only. At each site, we collected water samples and deployed sensors off the pontoon of the plane to measure lake optics. One lake was too small for a normal take-off; our pilot Jim Webster demonstrated his experience and skill by instead slingshotting along the edge of the lake to get up to speed. Each day we would return to the cabin, which was studded with nails to keep the bears out, to filter samples and charge up equipment for the next day.

Our measurements would provide a ground truth for an airborne hyperspectral sensor called AVIRIS-NG, which collects images of the earth from an aircraft and was coordinated by NASA to fly over the lakes during our trip. Airborne remote sensing observations are crucial for mapping this remote landscape. The research flights would give us a birds-eye view of the thousands of lakes dotting the landscape.

At the cabin, filtering water samples into the broad sunlight of the late evening gave me time to ponder the scale of the surrounding landscape. As one human, it is hard to comprehend the sheer size of this carbon pool, just as it is hard to understand the size of the problem of climate change. Each lake filter I collected was just one tiny clue in this bigger puzzle. Accumulating and interpreting these clues is the work of science. NASA’s ABoVE campaign can amplify the work of scientists from many disciplines by bringing us to work side-by-side in our efforts to understand this rapidly changing landscape.

Keywords:Arctic, carbon, green, airborne, ABoVE, organic carbon, terrestrial, climate change, terrestrial ecology, NASA, productivity

Acknowledgements: This research was made possible by funding from the NASA ABoVE program and an NASA NESSF graduate research fellowship. Special thanks to our field team, including my advisor Dr. David Butman, our pilot Jim Webster and our USGS collaborators.

Literature Cited:

1. Tarnocai, Charles, et al. “Soil organic carbon pools in the northern circumpolar permafrost region.” Global biogeochemical cycles23.2 (2009).
2. Schuur, Edward AG, et al. “Vulnerability of permafrost carbon to climate change: Implications for the global carbon cycle.” AIBS Bulletin 58.8 (2008): 701-714.
3. J. Richter-Menge, J. E. Overland, J. T. Mathis, and E. Osborne, Eds., 2017: Arctic Report Card 2017, http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card.
4. Elder, Clayton D., et al. “Greenhouse gas emissions from diverse Arctic Alaskan lakes are dominated by young carbon.” Nature Climate Change 8.2 (2018): 166.
5. Bogard, Matthew J., and David E. Butman. “No blast from the past.” Nature Climate Change 8.2 (2018): 99.

Meshing with Data: Hacking Communications Solutions following Natural Disasters

Freshwater Initiative student Jimmy Phuong is a UW School of Medicine PhD Candidate in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education studying computationally intensive, data-driven knowledge discovery in health research.  He is currently facilitating the collection of spatio-temporal, socio-demographic data in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. In June 2018, he had the opportunity to participate in Meshing with Data, a 43-hour hackathon which brought together computer scientists, software engineers, and other scientists to innovate solutions to communications problems following natural disasters.  Here, he describes the hackathon experience.

On a recent trip to Puerto Rico, I had the opportunity to engage with stakeholders, community members, and researchers directly affected by Hurricane Maria in fall 2017. Many of these people described how they understood the water quality and health issues following Maria, but disrupted communications channels made communicating these risks slow, irregular, and delayed. Community response required faster communications to be effective.

At this time, I learned about the upcoming Meshing with Data hackathon, which would bring together computer scientists, software engineers, and other scientists to innovate solutions to major communications problems following natural disasters. This event is designed to crowd-source existing engineering expertise through applied interactive workshops. When I learned about this event, I was excited because if anyone could come up with helpful solutions, I thought, it would be the engineering community, problem-solvers that they are. Workshops at the hackathon included lectures on blockchain technologies,internet of things, decentralized architecture, crowd-source platforms, and design thinking, all of which might be creatively applied to mass communications problems.

But looking at the event schedule, I realized that representation for domain expertise focused on computer engineering only. After Hurricane Maria, many communities spent months concerned about drinking water availability. Without power, hospitals and medical aid were severely exhausted, and aid could not be deployed to many places due to remoteness, broken roads, or flood. This needed to be addressed, so with the help of my colleagues, I wrote a successful Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) proposal to attend the Meshing with Data hackathon as an advocate for water and health sciences.

The Meshing with Data hackathon took place in Bayamón, Puerto Rico at a facility known as Engine-4. Engine-4 is an incubator space for start-up companies, but following Hurricane Maria, Engine-4 served as an “internet plaza,” an oasis with generator-powered electricity and internet access. Beside it stood a weather-damaged stadium that is currently used as a FEMA disaster recovery center. Strewn about the parking lot were remnants of fallen lamp posts.

On the first day of the hackathon, I was struck by the diversity of expertise and career stage in the room. I stumbled through pleasantries in Spanish with undergraduate students, other graduate students, mid-career software engineers, and a few people in cryptocurrency technologies. Hoping to put my water and health science expertise to use, I formed an awesome team with a motley crew: a CEO for a cryptocurrency company, an undergraduate in chemical engineering turned computer engineering, and an undergraduate in computer engineering with drone expertise.

Together, we sprinted through the 43-hour hackathon, working to develop a minimum viable product that might serve as a solution to communications problems following natural disasters. Like other hackathons that I’ve completed in the past, teams were motivated by a monetary prize for the most innovative, functional, and feasible product. 43-hours is a long time; that sort of sprint takes its toll on the body by way of mental and physical exhaustion. Tums were necessary!

Once the hackathon started, our team designed our product iteratively. We thought about ways to use drones to establish a mesh communication network over a large region. For example, with drones flying over affected areas, distributed community members might report their current condition, which would be relayed from the drone back to response teams: flooded, not flooded, downed trees, food needed, medical attention required, etc. We thought it might be easy for community members to communicate these messages with visual codes, or emojis, and then translate those messages into a visual map of high-level need areas for dispatch responders.

With each passing hour, our product idea was refined further. Meshing with Data hackathon mentors were available around the clock to bounce ideas and provide feedback, which was invigorating! Ultimately, our unfinished end product used a open-source mesh network software called Byzantium. Though more accomplished entries won the cash prize, our diverse team ended up generating some great ideas that still have many possibilities left unexplored.

Thanks to the ESIP funding, I am excited to propose similar contingency projects at future WaterHackWeek events in an effort to spark innovations in the water resource scientific community.

Postdoctoral Opportunity: Quantitative Ecology

Dr. Steve Katz and Dr. Stephanie Hampton of Washington State University are seeking a postdoctoral associate for collaboration in freshwater research, with a general emphasis on highly quantitative approaches to understanding ecology and system stability, but with specific topics to be defined primarily by the successful candidate. Special opportunities exist for the postdoc to engage in interdisciplinary research on stability and behavior of food-energy-water systems, as part of a large collaboration. Additional areas of current interest include time series analysis of multivariate long-term data, under-ice ecology, monitoring and evaluation of stream restoration at regional scales, and global patterns in freshwater use and status. However, we are open to considering many areas of inquiry for the postdoctoral researcher’s work.

A Ph.D. (A.B.D. candidates will be considered) and a record of peer-reviewed publication in a relevant science field are required. Strong commitment to collaborative work is necessary, and experience working in large research collaborations is desired. Experience with programming in R is ideal, but those experienced in other programming environments should feel free to contact us to determine their fit to this position.

The postdoc will be based at Washington State University working directly with Dr. Stephanie Hampton and Dr. Steve Katz. While there is flexibility in start date, we anticipate that the postdoc will be in residence at WSU-Pullman by September 2018, with the yearly appointment renewable up to two years. Please direct inquiries to s.hampton@wsu.edu and steve.katz@wsu.edu with subject “Ecology Postdoc.” A complete application will include a Statement of Interest (1-page maximum) that outlines some of the areas of potential research, and a C.V. with the names and contact information for 3 professional references. For full consideration, please apply by 27 July 2018, but applications will be reviewed until the position is filled.

Coal mining has negative impact on freshwater stream biodiversity

Coal energy is expected to remain a key component of the national electricity portfolio until 2040, according to the Energy Information Administration.  Previous research suggests that coal mining operations can negatively impact the environment.  For instance, mountaintop-mining valley fill operations, common across Appalachia, often result in bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals in fish while other mining operations acidify freshwater streams.  Current federal regulations, like the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977), aim to protect the environment from degradation by providing operational standards to minimize the surface impacts of mining.

However, a recent study, published in Nature Sustainability and co-authored by Freshwater Initiative researcher Julian Olden, found that despite current laws and regulations, mining operations continue to have a detrimental impact on freshwater streams.  Where previous research has focused on a single mining operation or region, this study, led by Xingli Giam at the University of Tennessee (a former UW post-doctoral researcher), provides a quantitative meta-analysis of the impact of coal mining on stream health across multiple regions of the United States, according to a variety of mining operations, and under existing environmental regulations.

The study reported that streams affected by coal mining had, on average, a one-third reduction in biodiversity and only half of the total organism abundance of unaffected streams.  Invertebrate, fish, and salamander species richness (e.g., the number of different species living in the stream) declined by 32%, 39%, and 28%, respectively.  The study also suggests that even where federal regulations had mandated stream restoration, biodiversity and total organism abundance were still lower than unaffected streams.

The authors argue that for regulations to be effective, they must have broad, public support.  It is necessary to identify bipartisan arguments for conservation that resonate across a wide variety of backgrounds and belief systems.  For example, appeals to improving public health (coal mining has a high human health cost, including lung cancer and kidney disease) and recreational fishing and hunting (streams provide recreational opportunity) may both attract broad support.  Without stricter regulations backed by public support, coal mining operations will continue to degrade stream health across the United States.

You can read the full study here.

Long-term water resources data collection network is shrinking

Though nearly 71% of the Earth is covered in water, less than 3% of Earth’s water is fresh water, and only about 0.3% is readily available to humans in lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands.  Reliable accounting of this limited resource is therefore fundamental to manage freshwater allocations to both ecosystems and society.  Networks of stream gages, known as “hydrometric networks,” have traditionally provided scientists with long-term records of water flow, water height, and other water quality variables.  However, a recent study finds that the global hydrometric network is not keeping pace with freshwater monitoring needs around the world.  The number of stream gaging stations reporting data to publicly available data repositories, called Water Information Systems, is declining.

Freshwater Initiative researcher Julian Olden is a co-author on a new study which proposes prioritizing stream monitoring by identifying watersheds that rely on hydrologic data for conservation initiatives.  The authors explain that long-term data, and thus a hydrometric network of monitoring stations, is needed for sustainable water management.  Here, knowledge is power: it is imperative to know how much water is available, where it is available, and when it is available.

Long-term hydrologic data collected through hydrometric networks is used to evaluate climate effects on freshwater resources, to track changes in river or stream flow patterns, and to improve flood and drought forecasting.  However, two of the largest Water Information Systems, the Global Runoff Data Centre and the United States Geological Society’s National Water Information System, are shrinking in monitoring capacity due to financial vulnerability, weakening infrastructure, and shifting priorities away from long-term data collection.

The authors argue that shrinking Water Information Systems may compromise human responsiveness to water challenges and the ability to monitor freshwater biodiversity.  It is not possible to respond to global water crises if researchers cannot forecast them for lack of long-term data.  The authors identified watersheds with a “High Monitoring Need” that should be prioritized for their water scarcity, high flood risk, or high biodiversity.  Coupled with policy recommendations for the maintenance of hydrometric networks, this prioritization strategy may secure the continuation of long-term data needed for sustainable water management.

You may visually explore the data used in this study, including stream gage distribution and stressed watersheds in the United States, here.

You may read the full study, published in Nature Sustainability, here.

Job Announcement: Freshwater-eScience Research Scientist

Civil and Environmental Engineering and the eScience Institute have an outstanding opportunity for a Research Scientist/Engineer 4 at the University of Washington, Seattle Campus.

The Research Scientist/Engineer will provide research support and develop leadership in the interdisciplinary Freshwater Initiative in collaboration with College of Engineering, College of the Environment, and UW Tacoma researchers.  This field of research spans and intersects Civil Engineering, Environmental Science, Computer Science, and Data Science. We are seeking to enhance our impact in computational sciences for interdisciplinary research, made possible due to additional funding from the Mountain to Sea Strategic Research Initiative to support the Freshwater Initiative.  This position will coordinate with eScience research staff, which includes researchers from many fields, including physical, mathematical and biological sciences, to expand the footprint of engagement between eScience and Freshwater.

This position will plan and execute research programs in collaboration with Freshwater faculty and other researchers through independent research activities.  This will include research project formulation, research project execution, research project publication, software development, graduate and undergraduate student mentorship, and other activities designed to advance research in Freshwater systems.  This position will report to the Freshwater Faculty Director and work closely with the Freshwater Executive Director and UW eScience Institute Executive Directors.  This position will collaborate with colleagues who are both researchers at UW (professors, other professional staff, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students) and users (domain experts within .gov and NGO stakeholders).  Because this effort is both a research project and a technology and training delivery project, its requirements can change rapidly.  The successful candidate will need to adapt to different roles and responsibilities as requirements change, and act as a key point of contact for the project across different organizational units.

REQUIREMENTS

• PhD in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics with research focus on water resources questions that include expertise in working with large spatial datasets and complex numerical models.
• At least 4 years of experience with hydrologic modeling and hydrologic data analysis.

DESIRED QUALITIES

• Working knowledge of current field and hydrologic modeling methods to assess Freshwater systems.
• Experience working with and managing large, long-term data sets derived from models, field experiments and observational studies.
• Demonstrated experience in applying data science tools to aquatic science and/or hydrologic science research needs
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to work both independently and as part of a dynamic team environment.
• Competence with qualitative and quantitative data analysis and associated software such as R, Python and Matlab.
• Demonstrated experience in publishing water-related scientific research and communicating effectively through writing and presentations.
• Demonstrated ability to interact in a collaborative manner with other team members to accomplish organizational goals.
• Demonstrated experience in coordinating projects in geospatial data hack training and educational programs.
• Demonstrated experience in providing mentoring.

More details about the position and information about how to apply can be found here.

Call for Abstracts: 9th Annual Northwest Climate Conference

Call for Abstracts Now Open!

The call for abstracts for the 9^th Annual Northwest Climate Conference – Working Together to Build a Resilient Northwest is now open. Submit your abstract for special sessions, oral presentations, and posters by Friday, June 8, 2018 to the abstract submission page.

The 9th Annual Northwest Climate Conference will be held October 9-11, 2018 at the Riverside Hotel in Boise, Idaho.

Submissions are requested for a range of topics focused on climate and adaptation. Presentations and special sessions that connect science to management decisions and implementation of adaptation actions are strongly encouraged. Emphasis is on talks that are comprehensible to a wide audience on topics of broad interest. Potential topic areas include:

• Agriculture: impacts and adaptations
• Aquatic ecosystems: impacts and adaptations
• Coastal issues and shoreline management: impacts and adaptations
• Collaboration and co-production of decision-relevant research
• Communicating climate risks
• Economics of adaptation (e.g., costs of inaction, benefits of adaptation)
• Equity and climate justice
• Extreme events (e.g., drought, floods, wildfire): impacts and adaptations
• Forests and forest ecosystems: impacts and adaptations
• Hazard mitigation planning
• Human health: impacts and adaptations
• Hydrology and water resources: impacts and adaptations
• Infrastructure and the built environment: impacts and adaptations
• Insurance and risk management: impacts and adaptations
• Nearshore and marine ecosystems: impacts and adaptations
• Regional climate variability and change
• Terrestrial ecosystems: impacts and adaptations
• Tribal communities: impacts and adaptations
• Working across organizational or sectoral boundaries

More about the conference. The NW Climate Conference annually brings together more than 300 researchers and practitioners from around the region to discuss scientific findings, challenges, and solutions related to the impacts of climate on people, natural resources, and infrastructure in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. The conference aims to stimulate a place-based and cross-disciplinary exchange of information about emerging climate, climate impacts, and climate adaptation science and practice in the Northwest. The conference also provides a forum for the presentation of emerging policy and management goals, objectives, and information needs related to regional climate impacts and adaptation. Conference participants include policy- and decision-makers, resource managers, and scientists from academia, public agencies, sovereign tribal nations, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector.  More details can be found at http://pnwclimateconference.org/.

Get to Know the Center for Urban Waters

By Nina Zhao

Located along the shores of Commencement Bay in Tacoma, WA, the Center for Urban Waters is a revolutionary research facility designed with the environment in mind.  The founding partners of the Center for Urban Waters – the City of Tacoma, the University of Washington-Tacoma, and the Puget Sound Partnership – are committed to seeing this unique, innovative water research facility grow along with water research demands.

The vision for this premier research center goes back to 2002 and a group of community leaders committed to restoring and protecting the Puget Sound.  With generous endowment from both government and private parties, the Center began to welcome its tenants in 2010, after nearly a decade of endeavor.

Today, the Center for Urban Waters is home to researchers dedicated to routine environmental monitoring of the Puget Sound region, scientists exploring both fundamental and applied environmental research questions, and policymakers focused on using the latest science to develop effective environmental restoration and stewardship strategies.  Here, science, engineering, and policy meet for sustainable growth of the Puget Sound.

The Center itself is a masterpiece in pollution control and sustainable energy usage.  Under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building rating system, the Center for Urban Waters boasts a Platinum certification, the highest possible designation.  Building construction favored locally and sustainably manufactured materials.  More than 99% of the waste generated during construction was recycled.

Impervious surface rainwater runoff delivers harmful pollutants into urban waterways (which is a hot research topic at the Center).  The Center for Urban Waters building mitigates this runoff by using pervious pavers and rain gardens, which allow for natural filtration of rainwater, reduce flooding, and provide habitat for beneficial birds and insects.  Geothermal wells and natural sunlight and ventilation save energy while heating and cooling the building.  Additionally, water reuse systems and efficient plumbing fixtures help the Center consume 46% (or 400,000 gallons) less water per year than conventional facilities of the same size.

Freshwater Initiative researchers Joel Baker, Edward Kolodziej, and Andy James work on cutting-edge environmental problems at the Center for Urban Waters.  Their research addresses issues of pre-spawn mortality of Coho salmon, urban stormwater runoff, and agricultural runoff pollution in the state of Washington.  Their work is made possible in part by the impressive analytical capabilities of the Center for Urban Waters, including machinery to detect heavy metal and organic chemical contamination in water.  For more about the Center’s analytical prowess, please visit their website.

More details about the Center for Urban Waters can be found on their website, including virtual facility tours and student internship opportunities.

Field Notes: Snow Science in Switzerland

In February and March 2018, Freshwater Initiative graduate students Ryan Currier and Justin Pflug from the University of Washington Mountain Hydrology Research Group, had the opportunity to take snow research to the field at the Institute of Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) in Davos, Switzerland. Going out to the field took on a whole new meaning in the highest elevation city of Switzerland, with field sites only minutes from their front door. Here, Justin tells us a little bit about the friends and connections made in the field, their time at SLF, and lunch breaks spent on the slopes.

We traveled to Davos to collaborate with the SLF Snow Hydrology Research Group. Much of this group’s current work focuses on forest-snow interactions like sub-canopy albedo, snow interception, wind deposition, and forest micrometeorology. Due to our overlapping research interests and an exceptionally good Swiss snow-year, much of our time was spent tackling issues of forest-snow observation both at the SLF campus and in the field.

Snow accumulation and melt are commonly measured across different landscapes and vegetation types with a number of terrestrial, airborne, and space-based remote-sensing platforms. Among the most popular is airborne light diffraction and ranging (lidar) which has been used for widespread snow depth observation in a number of large-scale snow campaigns. However, accuracy of airborne snow depth measurements in forests have yet to be fully vetted. Before using airborne snow depth measurements to understand forest-snow processes, validation of these observations is a necessary first step. We therefore combined ground validation data from the United States (Colorado) with airborne data from Southeastern Switzerland. We’re still busy crunching the numbers, but the results seem to indicate that airborne measurements of snow depth are reliable. Prior to concluding this project, graduate student Giulia Mazzotti (picture, left below in orange jacket) from SLF will join us this summer in Seattle. Make sure to say hi if you are around campus!

During our time at SLF, we also spent time assisting other related projects in the field. Fieldwork included moving mobile meteorological stations (above, right), collecting below and above-canopy albedo from airborne (below) and ground-based equipment (above, left), collecting snow depth transects from ground penetrating radar, and observing sub-surface snow properties by digging snow-pits. We were impressed by both the volume of the data collected and the technology used to collect it. This work provided us with motivation and ideas for future field campaigns in the Pacific Northwest.

Although we worked hard, we found ample time to enjoy Davos and the surrounding mountains. For those working at SLF, ski-touring and cross-country skiing were unanimously considered “lunchtime activities.” We did our best to keep up and skied frequently, especially considering we were within a comfortable walk to three different ski resorts from our front door (in ski boots). Other adventures included excursions to St. Moritz to watch horse races on ice, Zermatt to see the Matterhorn, trips to the Davos pools, and HC (Hockey Club) Davos hockey games. We also enjoyed time outside of work with coworkers on ski-tours and at dinner nights with traditional Swiss dishes like raclette and fondue. We feel truly grateful to have been afforded such an amazing experience and look forward to continuing to work with our collaborators in Davos, Switzerland.