Category Archives: E&EB research
News, outreach, and podcasts
A quick post to note some recent happenings. First off, last week I received an unexpected phone call from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a group of elected scientists that are part of an advising body to the US Government. You can read the official NAS announcement, Science magazine article, or Cornell’s press release.
Unrelatedly, we had a… Read more Reconstructing monarch’s evolutionary history in vivo using CRISPR flies!
I am super proud to report that Amy Hastings and I have been part of a wonderful collaboration with Noah Whiteman’s and Susanne Dobler’s labs reconstructing the evolutionary history of genetic changes in monarch butterflies experimentally (and in vivo) using fruit flies. You can read the paper, just published in Nature here.
Lots is being written about it, including the… Read more Remembrances of the last ESA meeting (2017)
I am sorry to miss this year’s Ecological Society of America meeting, currently ongoing in New Orleans. I lieu of ESA, next week I will be presenting at the International Society of Chemical Ecology meeting in Budapest. In addition, I am happy to report that Paul Metzler has produced a comic about last year’s meeting… one highlight is below.… Read more On the gift of sabbatical – A view from final days studying monarchs and milkweeds in Mexico (Part V)
Sabbatical is one of those remarkable gifts of the academy. At Cornell University, after 12 semesters of service on campus, one can apply for 1-2 semesters off campus, free from most administrative and teaching duties to focus on scholarship. This year has been my third sabbatical, and every one seems better than the last. I was unquestionably able to commune… Read more Grants and Seeds
The first grant season of the year is over. I got a couple grants and did not get a few others. It always feels like a mixed bag of “that’s so exciting, I can now do ALL the research mwahahahaha” to “it’s ok, I can work around the lack of funding by [insert: collaboration, reduce sample size, get rid of… Read more Different pesticides as insect killers
I recently came across a new study by a group of friends and colleagues that blew me away. Of all the environmental pollutants and nasty things we use to kill pests, who knew that fungicides (chemicals used to kill fungus) would become a problem for bumblebee pollinators. This study:
McArt, S. H., C. M. Urbanowicz, S. McCoshum, R. E.… Read more Second graders do science!
Science education should start early! And as part of our collaborative NSF grant on milkweed genetics and ecology (with Georg Jander from BTI and Steve Broyles from Suny Cortland), we are implementing outreach projects in the K-12 Ithaca schools. Led by research support specialist, Amy Hastings, and inspired by a set of experiments by former postdoc Patty Jones, second graders… Read more New synthesis of convergent evolution!
As part of being the Vice President of the American Society of Naturalists, I had the opportunity to organize a symposium at the annual meeting in 2016 (Austin, TX). The topic was convergence, natural history, and the big questions in biology. The talks were great, and what I think (hope!) will really have an impact on the field is this… Read more