Alyson Emery received and NSF INTERN award to participate in research through the Denver Botanic Gardens with Dr. April Goebl.
Doug Emlen visited DU as distinguished Long Lecture, hosted by Robin Tinghitella. It was a few days of great research conversations, a visit to the Denver Muesum of Nature and Science and two excellent presentations from Doug.
Camille and TJ presented their research at the ASN 2003 meeting at Asilomar.
The Larson Lab, Taylor Lab (University of Colorado Boulder), Runemark Lab (Lund University), and Velotta Lab (University of Denver) had a fall research retreat at CU’s Mountain Research Station. Everyone presented their research, cooked lots of great food and carved pumpkins.
Erica was interviewed by National Geographic for the article “Ligers, zorses, and pizzlies: How animals hybrids happen” by Jason Bittel.
“When you have two species whose genomes have undergone independent evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, and then you bring them back together, and you mix up those genomes in the form of a hybrid,” says Larson, “you get to understand what works and what doesn't.”
On Friday, May 13th, Amy Byerly successfully defended her Master’s degree and graduated this spring quarter. Congratulations Amy!
Alyson Emery and Scott Melander will join the DU graduate program this fall to work the field cricket hybrid zone.
Elise Gellman will be staying with the Larson Lab as a research technician over the next year through support from the NSF Research Experience for Post-Baccalaureate Students (REPs) program. Welcome back Elise!
Congratulations to NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology - TJ Firneno!
A great experience contributing to this amazing project led by Marc Johnson and team. It was fun to work with Shannon Murphy and Robin Tinghitella to include Denver! We show that urbanization leads to similar enviro changes and repeated adaptation across the world.
Kelsie’s first chapter of her dissertation is now published in Evolution! Beautiful work and beautiful figures, now memorialized in her new mug! Congratulations Kelsie!
Erica was elected to the American Genetics Association Council. She is excited to participate in this great society and is looking forward to the next President’s Symposium.
Exciting to see these new preprints online:
Kelsie’s first chapter of her dissertation - super proud of this one! https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.08.451646
An amazingly fun project with the awesome Mollie Manier: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.468624v1
A new paper on disrupted X chromosome expression in sterile mouse hybrids: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.468424v1
And two impressive collaborations led by the Good Lab at the University of Montana from Emily Kopania: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.04.455131v2 and from Emily Moore: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.468705v2
Kelsie presented her work on hybridization in Colorado cottontails at the American Genetics Association 2021 meeting Snowbird, Utah.
Dr. TJ Firneno is joining the Larson Lab as an NSF postdoc to study field cricket hybrid zones. TJ is broadly interested in exploring the molecular mechanisms that drive diversification and speciation, promote and maintain biodiversity, and lead to the evolution of novel traits. To do this he integrates field work, natural history, museum science, genomic and other molecular laboratory methods, and computational biology. In the past TJ has used amphibians and reptiles as study systems to carry out his research; however, he is now switching out to their desired food source as a study system: crickets. When not in the lab, TJ enjoys hiking and taking in the outdoors, is a lover of the performing arts, and enjoys simply spending time with his partner and their three cat children. Follow TJ on Twitter: @SenorSapo28. Pronouns: he/him
Elise Gellman and Christina Maguire were each awarded Undergraduate Summer Research Grants from the Undergraduate Research Center to pursue their independent research projects on field crickets. Elise and Christina have been busy rearing crickets and learning new techniques in the lab.
Kelsie gave two awesome talks in the last few weeks. The first was about her work on hybridization in Colorado cottontails at the American Society of Mammalogists and the second was about patterns of gene expression in complex tissues at the Evolution meeting.
The lab got together for a brunch in the park to celebrate Uma’s graduation this week. Uma will be moving on to a PhD program in the awesome Kozak Lab. We are also saying goodbye to Clara who started a new job in environmental consulting here in Denver and Amy who is off to do summer field work in Pennsylvania.
Cottontail rabbit original by Kelsie Hunnicutt
Amy, Uma, Kelsie, Clara, Erica and Summer