Who are we?

Washburn CHAOS Lab was built for science that refuses to stay confined to neat categories, sterile environments, or safe questions.

We investigate caves, contaminated landscapes, microbial ecosystems, and the powerful or deeply questionable chemistry being produced.

Washburn CHAOS Lab combines biomedicine, microbiology, geoscience, chemistry, pharmacognosy, and feral science communication to study how environment, microbes, and chemistry in real-world systems to have a real-world impact.

Around here, science is hands-on, field-driven, and unapologetically curious. We sequence to metal, interrogate ecosystems behaving badly, and believe science works best when it is allowed to get a little feral.

Life doesn't stay in one lane, so why should science?

Research Divisions

Our Feral Scientists

Science Communication

Submit a Site

Our mission

The Washburn CHAOS Lab studies how biology, geology, chemistry, and environment interact in real-world systems.

Our research spans caves, biocrusts, contaminated landscapes, extreme environments, built areas, and even places where humans have become part of the ecosystem. We combine microbial ecology, multi-omics, molecular networking, geochemistry, mineralogy, pollution chemistry, and geoinformatics with spatial and temporal patterns to understand how these systems function, what drives them to change, and what those changes mean for the biology and geology tangled up inside them.

We’re ultimately after the patterns that emerge when we study the whole integrated system, including if those patterns can point us toward useful compounds, microbes, resources, and other biological or geological potential.

Science at the Washburn CHAOS Lab is interdisciplinary, collaborative, field-driven, big-data heavy, and just feral enough to matter.

Our vision

The Washburn CHAOS Lab exists to build a scientific ecosystem with more ways to do science, more ways to be part of it, and a hell of a lot more room at the table.

Research, fieldwork, education, outreach, consulting, media, and public participation all belong in that ecosystem. Scientists, students, landowners, agencies, artists, educators, and anyone else with questions can bring different expertise, observations, ideas, and ways of thinking to the science.

The communities living in and interacting with the systems we study are part of that scientific conversation. Their knowledge matters. Their questions matter. Their observations matter. Access to the science happening in their own communities matters too.

We want rigorous, interdisciplinary science that can move between the lab, the field, classrooms, conferences, conventions, social media, and wherever else people are curious enough to start asking questions. Science can happen in a cave at 2 a.m., over a mass spectrometer, with a landowner who has spent forty years watching a landscape change, or because somebody at a comic con asked a question that absolutely demanded sciencing.

That’s the ecosystem we’re building: serious science, aggressively curious people, and as many ways into the process as we can possibly make.

Feral Science

FERAL Science is the philosophy behind how the Washburn CHAOS Lab approaches discovery.

Fearless curiosity
Engage everyone in discovery
Real systems, real science, real impact
Adapt when necessary
Link people, ideas, and disciplines

Science does not happen in neat boxes. Real systems are messy, interconnected, and constantly changing. Understanding them requires collaboration across disciplines, participation from communities, and a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads.

At the Washburn CHAOS Lab, we believe science should be rigorous, accessible, interdisciplinary, and actively connected to the people and environments it serves.

CHAOS Research Divisions

Behold the three pillars of CHAOS, where our research begins, and the noise of discovery never stops. Science doesn’t whisper here, it roars.

Metabolomic
Arsenal

HAVOC

Life under pressure makes weird chemistry. HAVOC studies bioactive compounds, metabolites, and molecular interactions produced across environmental systems to uncover new applications in health, industry, and environmental science.

Microbial
Upheaval

Life adapts, reorganizes, collapses, recovers, and occasionally does something completely unhinged. MAYHEM investigates microbiomes across changing natural and human-impacted systems and how those changes affect ecosystems and health.

Geologic
Crucible

Before there were microbiomes, metabolites, or ecosystems, there was geology. CONAN investigates the geochemistry and geochronology that shape Earth systems, resources, and the conditions that drive biological and chemical function.

MAYHEM

CONAN

Our team

The Washburn CHAOS Lab is built by field scientists, students, artists, researchers, and collaborators working across biology, geology, chemistry, media, and science communication. Some of us come from caves. Some come from laboratories, classrooms, code, geochemistry, or creative work. What connects the team is a shared obsession with understanding real-world systems and a willingness to follow the science into strange places.

Around here, fieldwork is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and usually covered in mud.

Dr. Rachel Washburn

DIRECTOR Of chaos

Laura Hamann

Volunteer RESEARCHER

Alissa Landefeld

Artist

Vicky Apostolides

Undergraduate Researcher

Mamie Clark

Potter Intern

Dr. Alex Washburn

geochemist, conan division head

Contact the Lab

Got questions, wild ideas, or a system doing something unhinged? You’re in the right place. You’re in the right place. Sign up for lab updates, talks, and ways to get involved in real fieldwork.

If you’ve got a cave, access to land, or a site with karst, weird water, or “this seems biologically questionable” energy, tell us.

Whether you’re a student, collaborator, landowner, or just curious, this is your way in.