The Hoke Lab had a great showing at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) 2017 conference in New Orleans!  Kim Hoke gave an invited symposium talk on incorporating  recursive neural circuits when examining target and action selection in animal communication. Jenny Stynoski and Molly Womack gave excellent talks  with the latest updates on the earless toad project.  Laura Stein presented the latest  phenotypic and behavioral results from a long-term guppy project aimed at examining genetic underpinnings of behavioral divergence. And Kim Dolphin gave her first conference talk outlining the first results from her studies  elucidating the effects of evolutionary history and rearing environment on  courtship behavior in guppies.  

We said tearful goodbyes to Molly as she begins her  new postdoc at UC Berkeley and the Smithsonian. We will miss you!

Check out the 'Publications' tab for an updated list of all Hoke Lab publications in 2016!

The Hoke Lab graduates its second PhD student - Dr. Molly Womack 
​
If you missed her defense but want to hear about her research on developmental bias and earless frogs - click here!
Congratulations Molly!

When should you listen to your mom's advice? Laura's fellowship will assess how offspring integrate maternal experience with population history and own experience into behavioral, morphological, and physiological phenotypes by incorporating behavioral, hormonal, neurobiological, and genomic approaches. Her fellowship will also provide funding to help develop hypothesis-driven STEM programs in cooperation with nearby schools, as well as develop resources for women in the early stages of their careers in biology. ​   Congratulations  Laura!

Jennifer Stynoski was awarded her own postdoc  funding through AAUW!!!
She will focus on  earless toad development as well as some genomic work with the guppies! 
http://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/fellowships_directory/#rid4060
​Congratulations  Jenny!

Masters student Jacob Edwards recently received an NSF East Asian and Pacific Summer Institutes grant to go to the Okinawa Institute for Science and Discovery this summer! Jacob will be working with Dr. Yoko Yazaki-Sugiyama on developmental plasticity in zebra finch brains.  As finches can learn their song only  during a very specific time window in life,  Jacob will be using gene silencing techniques to explore how the quality of learning experience influences the timing - both onset and closure - of this critical developmental phase. Congratulations Jacob! 

Toad ear expert extraordinaire Molly has recently been awarded a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the NSF! Molly's work will assess the  genetic architecture underlying ear loss events across Bufonidae. Congratulations Molly!

Eva Fischer's study on the interplay between genes and environment on correlated suites of behaviors and their evolutionary implications is out now in Journal of Evolutionary Biology!

Check out some recent updates on the toad ear project on Molly's research blog and Jenny's research blog.

If you haven't seen it yet, you might take a peek at the Earless Toad Website.

Also, congrats to Team Toad undergraduate Koedi Lawley for winning an award on her poster in the Math Department! Koedi, biology major and math minor, is developing a reaction-diffusion model to describe the growth of ear structures during development in our focal toad species. Nice work, Koedi!!

Graduate student Eva Fischer successfully defended her dissertation. Woohoo! 
Eva is looking forward to a fun-filled summer in Fort Collins before she heads to  a postdoc in the O'Connell Lab at Harvard  this  Fall

Undergraduate Hannah Buchek was awarded College Honors for her poster presentation "Effects of Alarm Cue and Predator Cue on Trinidadian Guppies". GO HANNAH!