Two first year OEB students and an incoming student have good news from NSF! Kit Straley, a student in the Warren lab, has awarded a 3-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her project “Changes in the Neighborhood: Suburban Food Availability and Behavioral Plasticity of Foraging Behaviors in Nesting Songbirds." Hannah Broadley, a student in the Elkinton lab, received Honorable Mention for her project ” Pupal Predation and Population Dynamics of an Invasive Defoliating Moth (Operophtera brumata).” Incoming OEB student Grace Pold, who will work with Kristen DeAngelis, also received Honorable Mention for her project "From the lab to the computer to the field – determining the extent to which lab-based ecology studies can be used to build models which accurately describe ecosystem carbon cycling.”

April's Science Café is on Monday, April 7th at 6:00PM Esselon Cafe. Dr. Patty Brennan will discuss Oddball Science – Why do We Study Weird Things?.

Brennan studies the evolutionary consequences of interactions between behavior, morphology and the environment. Recently, some of her work on sexual conflict in duck genitalia made headlines (in mostly conservative media, but see her response here) on whether this research constituted wasteful spending. Come out and hear why basic science, such as Patty’s, is worth funding.

OEB doctoral candidate Israel Del Toro has been awarded a 3-year NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship to start in September 2014. Del Toro will study the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the sky-islands of southwestern US and Northern Mexico. He will also look at the political ecology of the border region between the US and Mexico and how different management strategies impact the biodiversity of keystone arthropods. Del Toro will split his time between the University of Copenhagen's Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), New Mexico State University (NMSU) and the Jornada Long Term Ecological Research Station.

Suzanne Cox, PhD Student in the lab of Gary Gillis, had a successful time at this January's Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting. Not only was she runner up in this year's Best Student Paper contest in the Division of Comparative Biomechanics, she also received the best Oral Presentation Award by The Crustacean Society. Congratulations!