News & Announcements

That's Life [Science] - interdisciplinary Life Science Blog launching May 1st

An interdisciplinary group of life science graduate students has been working very hard over the last few months to put together a new outreach blog titled That's Life [Science]. Their blog goes live on May 1. To find out more, go to their website: thatslifesci.com.

Hancock awarded NSF GRF

The National Science Foundation has announced the 2016 recipients of their Graduate Research Fellowships. On the list is 2nd year OEB student Laura Hancock. Laura was awarded a 3-year, $34,000/year fellowship for her proposal titled "The effects of phenotypic and genotypic variation and growth/fitness tradeoffs on range expansion into a novel habitat for Alliaria petiolata." Fellowships were awarded to 2,000 individuals out of 17,000 applicants. Check here for more information on NSF's GRFP program. Congratulations Laura!

Normark receives Fulbright to study ancient native plants, invasive insect threat

Benjamin Normark, OEB & Biology faculty, was recently selected as a Fulbright scholar and will spend the fall 2016 semester in Mexico documenting the spread of the insect, cycad aulacaspis scale. It is an invasive species that threatens the country's cycads, plants sometimes called "living fossils" because they have changed little in the last 280 million years. Globally, says Normark, "Cycads are under unprecedented assault from armored scale insects and from the global nursery trade that sees cycads as commercially valuable ornamentals." Mexico is home to 55 of the world's 300 cycad species. Most of these are vulnerable or endangered, and many are culturally important, valued for stems that can be pounded into an edible meal, and for their foliage, still used for traditional religious ceremonies. Read more

Marjadi wins AFS Best Student Presentation Award

Meghna Marjadi (OEB MS student) won the Best Student Presentation Award for her talk, "Evaluating reproductive strategies in alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) using pedigree reconstruction" (co-authored by Adrian Jordaan, Allison Roy, Benjamin Gahagan, and Andrew Whiteley) at the Southern New England Chapter of the American Fisheries Society's Winter Science Meeting on January 14th, 2016 in Groton, Connecticut.

Sarah Goodwin Dissertation Defense

9:00 a.m.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
209 French Hall
Dissertation Title: Song perception in communication networks
Advisor: Jeff Podos

Scott Schneider Dissertation Defense

Melissotarsus ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) and armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae)

9:30 a.m.
Monday, March 28, 2016
209 French Hall
Dissertation Title: The meat-farming ants: Predatory mutualism between Melissotarsus ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) and armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae)
Advisor: Ben Normark

Studying Climate Change Impact on Maple Syrup Quality

As maple sugaring season approaches, plant ecologist Kristina Stinson recently received a two-year, $149,800 grant to study the impact of climate change on the quantity and quality of sugar maple sap, including its chemical composition, and of sap from red maples, a species less sensitive to climate change.

TLDG schedule for spring

The theme for the 2016 Thursday Lunch Discussion Group (TLDG) is once again Interesting papers by upcoming seminar speakers. The group will meet in the French Library (205 French) at noon on Thursdays and lunch is provided. On weeks without a seminar speaker, there will be no TLDG. Links to pdfs of each week's paper are posted here: TLDG website. Thanks to Grace Pold and Daniel Petersen for organizing this spring.

Peterson's collections-based research gaining attention

Daniel Peterson's recent Evolution paper "Phylogenetic analysis reveals positive correlations between adaptations to diverse hosts in a group of pathogen-like herbivores" is discussed under "Research highlights" in the current issue of Evolutionary Applications. Peterson is an OEB PhD candidate in the Normark lab.