OK, the last recap. Courtney, Yoshi, and Taka (visitor from Kyoto) visited the Burgess Shale, thanks to the trip organized by the Pan-Am Evo-Devo! It was amazing to be able to visit such an iconic place for evolutionary biology. On top of that, the scenery from the Burgess Shale fossil site was beyond describable!
We attended several conferences during the summer.
Yoshi presented at the 4th Asian-Pasific Drosophila Conference in Osaka Japan, Indian Society for Developmental Biologists in Pune India, and Pan-American evo-devo conference in Calgary Canada.
Courtney presented her poster at Pan-American evo-devo conference in Calgary Canada. She was also the student representative of the Pan-Am evo-devo council, working hard to organize the meeting.
All conferences were amazing and stimulating!
Bonus: students from shashi’s lab (who kindly hosted me during the conference) took me to the historical mountain fort near Pune. Amazing place!
We had to amazing visitors in our lab this summer. Ana Fernández, a PhD student from Xavier Belles lab in Barcelona Spain, spent three months with us and worked on elucidating metamorphosis mechanism in the German cockroach, Blattella germanica. Taka Ohde, an assistant professor at Kyoto University, also visited us. We worked together on establishing a mayfly culture method and analyzing mayfly morphology. Thank you both so much for visiting us. It was fun!!
Jake Schultz, a sophomore undergrad researcher, spent the entire summer in the lab and conducted his USS-funded project on establishing mayflies as an evo-devo model system. Thanks to the hard work of Jake and Courtney, we now have some mayflies in the lab!
The special issue of Current Opinion in Insect Science that Yoshi Tomoyasu and Haruhiko Fujiwara at Tokyo University edited came out during the summer. The section “Development and regulation: The diverse traits that have facilitated the successful radiation of insects” (link) contains a lot of cool review articles on insect evo-devo, so don’t miss it :-) Here is the editorial overview (pdf). Huge thanks to all the contributed authors who made this special issue possible!
Now the website is in better shape, we will recap what we did during summer. First, about David, who successfully defended his dissertation on June 8th. Congratulations, Dr. Linz! He is now a post-doc in Moczek lab at Indiana University (an awesome evo-devo lab!), playing with cool dung beetles :-) Good luck, David!
On a much-needed update….