I wrote a little primer on social effects in quantitative genetics for the Springer’s Encyclopedia of Evolution which is now available online. It’s an introduction to how social interactions between relatives and non-relatives affect the standard model of phenotypic evolution. There are some equations involved, but everything is simplified and explained for the mathophobic.
If you don’t have access to this chapter via your library and would like to read it, drop me an email.
Congrats to Tamara Fetters, who passed her preliminary exam today, and is now the lab’s first full-fledged Ph.D. candidate!
Tamara and Julie were among a group of Interfaces of Global Change fellows that participated in this year’s science fair at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School. The Global Change Center blog has the whole story.
Undergraduate researcher Tyler Miller was one of only 21 students selected for this year’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program sponsored by the Fralin Life Science Institute. Tyler will be working on an independent project related to our work on the evolution voltage-gated sodium channels.
Congratulations, Tyler!
Tamara and Julie went lizard collecting in the Southeast last September. Julie has a blog post and photos from their trip at her website.
We have finally updated our lab webpage after a long hiatus. I have added a lot items to the Lab News section for events that happened during the fallow period. I’ve also updated lots of the old posts with more information and pictures to give you a better idea of what we’ve been up to over the years. Now that the lab website is powered by WordPress, new updates should happen a lot more frequently!
I just returned from SICB 2016, where Bob Cox, Fran Bonier, and I co-organized an NSF-sponsored symposium on Evolutionary Endocrinology. We had a fantastic group of speakers, and we’re currently putting together a special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology based on the symposium. In the meantime, I posted some immediate reactions to the talks on Twitter. Of course, there was much more happening at the meeting. Here are the top tweets from #SICB2016.
Tamara Fetters and John Abramyan, along with Skylar Hopkins (Belden Lab) and Ariel Leon (Hawley Lab) just received a grant from the VT Global Change Center to start up a project on parasites of brown anoles in New Orleans! Congrats!
The McGlothlin Lab had a booth at this year’s Virginia Science Festival entitled “Reptile Relatives,” which both showcased reptile diversity and showed how similar skeletal structure reveals that reptiles are our (distant) relatives. Lab members put in a lot of work designing and running the booth, and we had excellent turnout from the community.
Today a new postdoc, John Abramyan, joins the lab. John comes to us from the University of British Columbia, where he has been working on amniote tooth development. He also has interests in genomics and gene-family evolution, and here he’ll be working on our NSF-funded project on voltage-gated sodium channels. Welcome to Blacksburg, John!
Incidentally, John was involved in the recent genome project for the painted turtle. This story describes his work on that project and includes a video and a photo of John looking really sciencey.