Who Summoned Us?
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 weird.
Because nature is messy. Science should be allowed to be messy too.
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 weirdest 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.
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
Potter intern
Sarah
Gilbert
Undergraduate researcher
Aydin Khosrowshahi
Undergraduate Researcher
Dr. Alex
Washburn
geochemist, conan division head
Summon 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.
