Lab Girl is Hope Jahren ’s memoir, tracing her trajectory from a curious child in her father ’s lab to her career as a successful science researcher, wife, and mother. Jahren grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota, where she would spend her evenings playing in her father’s science laboratory at the local community college. Jahren is a beautiful writer. Her chapters on soil and trees and plants were gripping and eye opening-even for this scientist reader. Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered.
Bill Hagopian
Senior Research Laboratory Manager
I started working with Hope Jahren in 1994, who at the time was a grad student in Ron Amundson's lab at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1996, as a new assistant professor, Hope hired me to set up and manage her stable isotope lab, first at Georgia Tech, then Johns Hopkins University, then the University of Hawaii, and currently at the University of Oslo (Norway).
Over the years, one of my main responsibilities has been to provide a sense of continuity for the varied research projects, some spanning a decade or more, and to assure consistency in both the lab and field endeavors. I oversee all aspects of the laboratory, including installation of new instrumentation, training of lab personnel in stable isotope techniques and instrument operation, and maintenance and upgrading of instrumentation. I’ve also developed a stringent quality assurance and quality control program for all samples processed through the lab that all lab personnel must adhere to, from the point of collection, to the final data processing.
Hope Jahren Website
Since a large part of the research program is field oriented, I have had the opportunity to lead extensive field excursions throughout the Continental US, Southwest Ireland, the Canadian Arctic, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and I have participated in field projects in Brazil, China, and a marine research cruise in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific. One of the biggest draws for me is the multidisciplinary aspect to our research program. The combination of field and laboratory work that spans across the fields of geology, soil science, hydrology, paleontology, botany, medical science, and forensics, has kept my job exciting, challenging, and extremely rewarding.