© JULIA TIM/SHUTTERSTOCK.COMOn a warm September day, paleoecologist Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie and her colleagues hiked to a lake in Maine’s Acadia National Park, set up a floating research platform, and drilled deep into the sediment in the lakebed, pulling up a meter-long shaft of soil. “It took us . . . maybe three and a half days to actually get our cores out of the lake, and then we hiked everything back down,” she tells The Scientist a few months later. “Right now, that core is sitting in a cold room at the University of Maine waiting for me.”
McDonough MacKenzie, who uses the pollen in these cores to reconstruct the biological responses of plants to past climate change, is a postdoc at the institution. But you might not immediately realize that from looking at her schedule. Although she typically spends weeks at a time in the Maine lab of her advisor, paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill, in between research trips around the state, the rest of McDonough MacKenzie’s time is spent working from her hometown, Boston. After all, while she needs lab access for sample preparation and analysis, the rest of her activities—reviewing data, reading research papers, writing up notes of the results she’s gotten, and preparing for her future fieldwork—she can carry out from anywhere.
This arrangement is no accident: McDonough MacKenzie officially holds ...
