Searle Lab

Many congratulations to both Soraia and Marja during June on defending their PhDs so brilliantly! Both were wonderful occasions full of Portuguese and Finnish tradition!

Thank you to Chiara visiting from Italy during May and a return visit from Alex (Portugal/Costa Rica) during May and June. It was great to have you join us!

Also from Italy: Wonderful news from Marghe – her son Diego arrived at the beginning of May! We wish you all the very best!

Congratulations to undergraduate Jeremy for his REU working with Dr. John Maerz, a salamander biologist at the University of Georgia. Also for his paper in J Comp Physiol B.

Congratulations to Jon for his Master’s degree from McMaster University, which sounds a bit like the famous Boaty McBoatface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface). Seriously though, well done to Jon. Above a picture of him celebrating with a victory chalice!!

Congratulations also to Nick for the Gitner Prize (http://as.cornell.edu/gitner-prize) for teaching – which is fantastic, a real credit for a lot of dedication!

Also well done to our lab members who have received grants for research: Mellons to Ben, Jacob and Jon, Orenstein to Nick and a Herpetological Society grant to Ben.

Amazing!

Frida and Jeremy both gave talks at the Mammal Society of Great Britain Annual Meeting in Cambridge. They took time out to go to the Eagle pub where Watson and Crick used to hang out. Meanwhile back in Ithaca … congrats to Jacob and Jon on their Mellon grants!

Congratulations to Jacob for gaining a Provost Fellowship for the next academic year!

It’s been fun having Paulo and Joana visiting Ithaca again from the University of Porto, Portugal.

Jeremy has been making the most of his sabbatical with a visit to Zhejiang University in China. Here is a picture of him in a bamboo forest in the Botanic Gardens of Hangzhou.

Nick is one of two The Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award recipients for being a dedicated and exceptional teaching assistant. Below in the first photo, Nick celebrates with Jeremy. In the second photo, Nick holds his certificate with Steffen Blings, the other award recipient. Congrats!

In late Nov, Jasmine had her baby girl, Sanai! Congrats!

Before switching her position as lab manager in the lab to website manager, Cassandra was sent to take over Jasmine’s role for her postdoc fieldwork in Berkeley, CA. Chris Conroy, the Mammalogy Curator for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, took some sweet photos of everybody in action. Brian, one of the lab techs at the MVZ, also joined in for the fieldwork fun!

Frida had her graduation ceremony at Cornell on Saturday, when Jeremy also had the opportunity to dress in robes (and a suit)! Cassandra and Frida’s sister Bylgja were able to join in on the fun!

The action never stops for the lab, even with the current freezing temperatures of Ithaca, NY. Both Jeremy and Jonathan had important roles for the departmental holiday party; Jeremy by giving an improvised presentation explaining why In-and-Out Burger restaurants are nonexistent in Ithaca, and Jonathan by narrating the first-year grad student cohort video as David Attenborough! The undergraduates gave their end-of-semester presentations before finals, and Henry Kunerth passed his A exam! Great job, everyone!

The Searle Lab welcomes a new member, Trevor Sless, a PhD candidate working on bees! And also Nick won the 2016 Cornelia Ye Outstanding TA Award, which is a university-wide teaching prize with only two recipients per year!

On Friday, Tamar and Austin made a 50 sec pitch and poster presentation on the health effects of Alaskan wildfires on human populations for ACSF members. They also had ran into Kermit the Frog!