Inigo San Gil joined the LNO in January as Senior Application Support Analyst to provide assistance on EML standard data compliance for the LTER Network. Inigo will work to create crosswalks between NBII Biological Data Profile (BPD) and EML standards as well as provide support to the different LTER sites to achieve their EML-related goals. He has been visiting and will continue to visit the LTER network sites in the coming months to assist with metadata management.
Inigo was born in San Sebastian, Spain and has quite a diverse professional background. He worked as a database developer while finishing his B.S. degree in Physics in Zaragoza, Spain. He then moved to the US to pursue a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Yale University. While working on his thesis dissertation (focusing on turbulence, fractals, and scaling laws), Inigo joined IBM Thomas Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, NY and later Los Alamos National Lab, where in addition to falling in love with the land of enchantment (New Mexico), he performed numerical simulations and data analysis on a number of supercomputing facilities. After completing his Ph.D, he joined the Yale Core Facility for Bioinformatics where he developed web-enabled databases and data analysis tools for genomic research. Inigo moved last year to New Mexico following his family and in joining the LTER will fulfill a lifelong dream to contribute to ecological research.
Michelle Murillo, formerly the Data Manager at LNO, has returned to a position at Los Alamos National Laboratories in January. Michelle, who also was previously involved with the Andrews and Sevilleta LTER sites, was instrumental in securing the LNO databases as part of the integration of network databases project. She also put a tremendous amount of work into the development of the Request Tracker (RT) ticket system, which has helped to streamline the request for assistance process at LNO.
After 33 years at KBS, Mike Klug has retired. Klug joined the faculty in the Department of Microbiology and Public Health at Michigan State University and KBS in 1971. Klug was cofounder of both the LTER program at KBS, where he was Director from 1996-2003, and the Center for Microbial Ecology at MSU.
While teaching the Microbial Ecology course at MSU for over 30 years, Klug also contributed to the development and teaching of a Biogeochemistry course at KBS. He was also involved in K-12 programs and led teacher enhancement programs funded by the Kellogg Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Klug and his wife Carol recently moved to an 80-acre wooded and grassy landscape in rural Southwest Michigan, but he lans to continue his involvement with KBS in some capacity in the future. Responding to questions about his new-found "freedom," Klug, who has three married children and a grandchild quipped: "Soon I’ll be tapping my trees, getting my beehives ready, ordering apple trees, and putting a hoop-house together..." You know -- the fun kind of work!
We wish Mike the best.
Andrew Corbin and Alice Gillespie
Kellogg Biological Station LTER