Please join us tomorrow at noon on the Carlson Library veranda to welcome the new graduate students at the Department picnic! Chef Hiram will be flipping hamburgers, veggie burgers and hotdogs. We will also have a variety of salads, chips, desserts and drinks.
The Department will provide the food and drink…you bring the sunshine!
Wishing all the August babies in the department a Happy Birthday! Here is the Garrigan Lab celebrating Dan’s Birthday. Based on the candles, can anyone guess how old Dan turned?
It’s Friday! So join us at 6 for Happy Hour at the new Bunga Burger Bar on Mt Hope Ave.
Dr. Thomas Werner, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is presenting a talk titled, “The role of toolkit genes in the evolution of complex wing, thorax, and abdominal color patterns in Drosophila guttifera,” on Tuesday, August 13.
Dr. Werner became interested in the question “What is life?” as a four-year old child in his parent’s garden in former East Germany. By the age of 10, he began to develop a life-long interest in the biology of butterflies and moths. He has been breeding and collecting them ever since. For his Master’s thesis, he decided to shift his focus to molecular biology because this was a newly emerging field of biology that promised new jobs. Thus, Dr. Werner studied the human heart disease-causing virus Coxsackie B3 at the molecular level at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dr. Werner made one of his childhood dreams come true and moved to Sweden. He spent seven years in Umeå, working on his Ph.D. thesis about the innate immune response in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. During this time at Umeå University in Dr. Dan Hultmark’s lab, he discovered and described a new family of immune genes that we humans share with flies and many other animals. In 2005, Dr. Werner shifted his research focus towards evolution of development (evo-devo) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Dr. Sean B. Carroll’s lab, where he established the fruit fly Drosophila guttifera as a new transgenic model organism to investigate how complex animal color patterns evolve.
Dr. Werner will be visiting the Jaenike lab for three full days, from August 12 through 14. If anyone wishes to meet with him during this time, please contact Dr. John Jaenike.
The EEB group is excited to announce the addition of two new faculty members in the near future. Dr. Christian Rabeling uses molecular phylogenetics to study the evolutionary biology of social ants, with a focus on reproductive strategies, social parasitism, and speciation. And Dr. Amanda Larracuente uses genomics, genetics and cytology to study the evolution of selfish DNA in Drosophila, with a focus on sex chromosomes, meiotic drive elements, and satellite DNAs. Dr. Rabeling’s lab will open for business in July 2014, and Dr. Larracuente’s will open in January 2015.
Congratulations to Rob Laport from the Ramsey Lab who, last week, successfully defended his dissertation on Polyploid speciation in the North American creosote bush (Larrea tridentata: Zygophyllaceae). Rob will be continuing his research as a postdoc in Diana Pilson’s lab
There is a new paper from our newest lab, the Brisson Lab, out in G3. The paper reports patterns of widespread selection across the Pea Aphid genome. Check out the paper and make sure to stop by and say hello to the Brisson Lab!
Last Friday, Julienne Ng successfully defended her dissertation. Degree in hand, Julienne will be joining the lab of Stacy Smith as a Postdoctoral Fellow this Fall to study color evolution in flowering plants. Join us all in congratulating Julienne and wishing her the best of luck.
Dr. Leo Fleishman, Professor in the Department of Biology at Union College, is presenting a talk titled “Sensory response as a selective force on signal design in Anoline lizards” on Friday, June 14. Dr. Fleishman’s research combines neurobiology and behavior to investigate how sensory systems and the environment influence signal evolution.
To learn more about Dr. Fleishman’s research or to see some behavioral videos, check out:
Laura Jones is leaving the department to begin a program at RIT this fall. She’s worked for the department for the past 5 years helping Mary and making fly food for many labs over the years. We wish her luck at RIT and we will miss her!