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!

Welcome Jenny! 
Last month we welcomed our new postdoc, Jenny Stynoski to Fort Collins.  Jenny comes to us from a long stint in Costa Rica and we're thrilled to have her frog experience and Spanish skills as part of the earless toad project. 

Congratulations Sarah!
Sarah Westrick has accepted a PhD  position in Dr. Ben Dantzer's lab at the University of Michigan. We are sad she will be leaving  us in May  but are looking forward to a lab field trip to visit her in Ann Arbor. 

Despite all our travels we managed to get together for a photo-op that shows off the first stage of our lab uniforms. 

In July Kim, Eva, and Molly travelled to Sapporo, Japan for the International Congress in Neuroethology. Our funding came in part from travel grants awarded to both Eva and Molly. See the photos section for biking and karaoke highlights. 

In August Eva spent a month hanging out in the Hofmann lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Eva received a lab exchange fellowship from the NSF Sociogenomics Research Coordination Network to fund her trip. Thank you to the wonderful members of the Hofmann lab for their hospitality and valuable feedback!