Tour de Franzia in honor of Dr. Anthony Geneva

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We have a little tradition in the Biology Department where we hold a Tour de Franzia for graduate students who successfully defend their thesis. This past weekend we celebrated Dr. Geneva using brand new, big-wheel tricycles. The results were pretty stellar! Looking forward to many more defense parties in the future (including one tomorrow night at Nox in the Village Gate… come celebrate Yasir!!)
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Congrats to Dr. Anthony Geneva

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Congratulations to Anthony Geneva from the Glor and Garrigan Labs who successfully defended his dissertation about “Integrative analyses of speciation in Anolis lizards”. There will be cake and champagne to celebrate Dr. Geneva in the grad student lounge today at 2pm. Anthony will be heading off to Harvard to start a post-doc in Jonathan Losos lab.

There will also be a party tonight at Bob’s house to celebrate both Anthony’s successful defense and Yasir’s (impending) successful defense!

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Upcoming Thesis Defenses!

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This summer has been quite productive for a few of our graduate students. Here are some upcoming thesis defenses happening this summer, hope to see you all there!

Anthony Geneva (Co-Advisors: Rich Glor and Dan Garrigan)
Friday, August 7, 10:00 AM, Hutch 473
“Integrative analyses of speciation in Anolis lizards”

Yasir Ahmed, (Advisor: Allen Orr)
Tuesday, August 11, 11:00 AM, Hutch 473
“The genetics of species differences in the Drosophila virilis group”

Frogs and Salamanders at Mendon Ponds!

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This spring the EEB department had lots of fun searching for frogs and salamanders at Mendon Ponds! Our fearless leader, Anthony, took us on multiple trips and we saw all sorts of creatures. Below are just two of the animals we saw on our trips. Seeing the salamander was particularly amazing because this species only come out once a year to mate in the ephemeral ponds, otherwise they live deep underground. We look forward to going out next year!
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Journal Club 4/21: Balancing Selection

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This week we’ll be reading about the maintenance of variation through balancing selection:

Bergland AO, Behrman EL, O’Brien KR, Schmidt PS, Petrov DA. 2014. Genomic evidence of rapid and stable adaptive oscillation over seasonal time scales in Drosophila. PLoS Genet. 10(11): e1004775.

Turchin MC, Chiang CWK, Palmer CD, Sankararaman S, Reich D, GIANT Consortium, Hirschhorn JN. 2012. Evidence of widespread selection on standing variation in Europe at height-associated SNPs. Nat. Genet. 44(9): 1015-1021.

Bird Watching at Mendon Ponds

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Last weekend a few graduate students went over to Mendon ponds to catch a glimpse of local birds. They encountered a large mixed flock of nuthatches, titmice, chickadees and sapsuckers as well as a downy woodpecker. Many birds even came to a hand to feed. We plan to go back next week to repeat the walk and bird feeding. We are also keeping an eye on the ephemeral ponds with the hopes of seeing the salamanders emerge to breed when conditions are right.
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