Congrats to Fríða on finishing her wonderful PhD at Cornell on thermal adaptations in American red squirrels! She managed to celebrated afterwards with The Boss, drinking the Arrogant Bastard ale!
It’s unfortunate that we’ve had to say goodbye to Sveta and Asia after their 6-month stays in Ithaca, but we are also welcoming a brand new graduate student, Jonathan Hughes, coming from a Master’s program in McMaster University, Canada, as well as a new undergraduate research assistant, Jeremy Pustilnik. Looking forward to your future work!
Soraia and Nick attended the NAACB 2016 meeting in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin. During the meeting they debuted and solicited members for their newly organized Conservation Genetics Working Group, which is applying for official status within the SCB. Soraia gave an excellent talk entitled “Non-invasive Genetic Sampling In Conservation: How Far Have We Got And How Far Can We Go?” during the session she organized, Communicating Genetics for Improved Conservation Action. Nick moderated two conservation genetics sessions as well. Overall it was a very productive and interesting conference!
Nick Fletcher had his students from the Galapagos 2016 trip write popular science-style articles about their experiences in the exciting archipelago of Ecuador, and they are now featured on the Office of Undergraduate Biology page!
Sveta, Nick and Henry went to Austin, TX for the Evolution Meetings ’16, which turned out to be an amazing conference!
Jeremy contributed to a Conservation Genetics course in Heredia organized by Alex Gomez Lepiz, who was visiting the lab at the end of last year. The red beer was remarkably tasty, apparently!
Henry Kunerth is joining the Searle Lab as a second year graduate student to continue his studies on speciation of corn borers. We’re excited to have you.
The Searle Lab enjoyed EvoDay ’16 last week, a full-day symposium on the topic of ‘Evolution and Conservation’, at the Lab of Ornithology. And Soraia gave a great talk on non-invasive genetics!
Photo credit: Svetlana Pavlova
The R2d2 paper which went online last month was covered by Science News. Read more about this selfish piece of DNA (nothing like the droid) here!
Joanna Stojak, a PhD student from Poland (left in photo), and Svetlana Pavlova (right in photo), a Fulbright scholar from Russia, are staying with us in the lab for six months. We’re excited to get to know them better!
Although Jasmine has now moved back to California for a PostDoc position in the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University, she will continue her affiliation with us at Cornell. We can’t wait to catch up with you next time we see you again!