Who are we?

The 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.

The Washburn CHAOS Lab combines biomedical geoscience, microbiology, geochemistry, and feral science communication to study how environment, microbes, chemistry, and health interact in real-world systems.

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

Because nature is messy. Science should be allowed to be messy too.

Research Divisions

Our Feral Scientists

Science Communication

Submit a Site

Our mission

At the Washburn CHAOS Lab, we study how biology, geology, chemistry, atmosphere, and real-world systems collide.

Our research spans caves, biocrusts, contaminated landscapes, built environments, microbial ecosystems, and subsurface systems to understand how microbes survive, adapt, communicate, and produce chemistry that can heal systems, disrupt them, or completely rewrite the rules underneath them.

We investigate microbial diversity, metabolite production, environmental chemistry, ecological disruption and recovery, and the biomedical potential hidden inside the wildest corners of the natural world.

Science at the Washburn CHAOS Lab is hands-on, field-driven, interdisciplinary, and just feral enough to matter.

Our vision

The Washburn CHAOS Lab exists to build a different kind of scientific ecosystem.

We believe rigorous science, fieldwork, education, outreach, consulting, media, and public participation should not exist as separate worlds. They should operate as part of the same connected system.

Our vision is to create a flexible, community-connected research organization where scientists, students, landowners, agencies, artists, educators, and the public can actively participate in discovery instead of only observing it from the outside.

We believe the communities living in and interacting with these systems deserve access to scientific knowledge just as much as the institutions studying them. Science should not disappear behind jargon, paywalls, or institutional barriers while the people most affected by these systems are left out of the conversation.

We want science that is collaborative, interdisciplinary, field-driven, operationally flexible, and accessible without sacrificing rigor.

Science should not live only behind institutional walls.

It should exist in caves, classrooms, field sites, public spaces, conversations, media, and communities actively engaging with the systems shaping their world.

Feral Science

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

Focusing on real-world systems
Engaging everyone in discovery
Respecting the data wherever it leads
Approaching questions from every angle
Linking 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.