Hi
everyone! My name is Colbi Gemmell and I am the Outreach Coordinator for
DROPPS. I conduct outreach and educational activities related to our research such
as: K-12 classroom visits, participation in local events, keeping up with
social media, and coordinating news about our team members. I have also been
organizing the DROPPS reading group which is comprised of ten DROPPS graduate
students, post-docs, and staff members. Participants are from the University of
Texas Marine Science Institute (Hernando Bacosa, Meredith Evans, Brad Gemmell,
Colbi Gemmell, and Tracy Harvey), Johns Hopkins University (Cheng Li and David
Murphy), Texas Tech University (Maryam Jalali-Mousavi), and the University of
Pennsylvania (Tagbo Niepa and Liana Vaccari).
In December
of 2013, the DROPPS reading group began as a monthly meeting where members got
together to discuss papers relevant to the field of oil spill science. After a
few of these meetings, the group determined that we wanted to do more than simply discuss the current
literature. DROPPS Research Associate Dr. Brad Gemmell came up with the idea of
conducting an extensive oil spill literature review with the goal of putting
together a publishable manuscript on global, long-term trends. The idea was based on reading groups that he had previously been involved in. The group agreed that
this was an exciting direction that allowed group members exposure to a large
portion of oil spill literature across a wide variety of years and disciplines. The group worked together
to develop a plan for obtaining, analyzing and completing such a large
literature review.
After
determining the keywords to use, important questions to be addressed and doing several
rounds of controls to ensure consistency, the DROPPS reading group started the
official literature review. Each participant had to review a predetermined
number of papers for assigned years to ensure that we were reviewing at least
10% of the available literature during each 5-year period dating back to 1968.
Data collection took a total of six weeks and included the review of approximately
1100 papers. Currently, participants are in the process of analyzing the data
in order to start putting together the manuscript. We are really excited to see
what story our data tells.
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Reading group members discuss oil spill papers during a
recent meeting.
