This year we hosted the third incarnation of the Guppy Retreat for our collaborative guppy grant. Day one took place at the Tamasag Conference Center, day two was at the Primrose Center and day three was at our brand new CSU Biology building in the fourth floor conference room with a fabulous view! Day one was focused on pulling together existing data and discussing publications and next steps. Day two focused on subsequent grant proposals. And a wonderful dinner together thrown in there, too! 

We had a great time at the 2017 Guppy Retreat!  It was really fun and unbelievably productive!

Laura Stein was pleased to host her former PhD advisor, Dr. Alison Bell, for this week's Biology Department Seminar! Alison gave a very interesting talk on  variation and plasticity  in social behavior in stickleback fish.  She had the opportunity to meet with professors and graduate students from the department and see first-hand where Laura is working these days. It  was our pleasure to host her and we hope she enjoyed her visit as much as we did!

Classes are starting, the undergraduates are returning to campus, and the Hoke Lab has moved to the new Biology building at Colorado State University. New college students are just beginning their academic year, but 2017 has already been a busy year for the Hoke Lab! Below are some of the highlights from Spring and Summer 2017:

In January the Hoke Lab took on a new Research Assistant, Leorah McGinnis. Check out the “People” tab to get to know her better.

In February Kim Dolphin, Laura Stein and Will Roberts went to Trinidad and a field trip to collect more guppies. Read about the Trindadian guppy system here!

In May Kim Hoke and Laura attended the IBANGS 2017 Genes, Brain and Bahaviour conference in Madrid, Spain. Laura presented a poster on trait correlations in guppies.

Also in May Kim D. gave her first talk on plasticity and courtship behavior at the 2017 Poeciliid Meeting (7th Conference of Poeciliid Biologists) in Norman, Oklahoma.

In June Laura attended the Methods in Ecological Genomic Analysis 2017 workshop at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in the Florida Keys, where she learned about gene expression analysis using TAG seq.

In July Kim D. and Laura went to Telluride, Colorado to do outreach with kids ages 5-10 through the Pinhead Institute. They used live guppies to teach lessons about natural selection, genetics and evolutionary biology.

Also in July Jacob Edwards presented a poster on "Plasticity and stability in the amphibian CNS over metamorphosis” at the Developmental Neurobiology Course in Okinawa, Japan where he learned about CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing and light-sheet microscopy using zebrafish.

Kim Hoke returned from her sabbatical in July.  It gave her   time to read a lot  of papers and synthesize even more fields of biology into her thinking.  In Part I, she  visited her field sites in Peru and build a new relationship with Mario Penna in Chile, which could lead to new future field sites. In Part II, she received a fellowship from Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study to work with Hans Gerd Nothwang and Ulrike Sienknecht in Germany.

In August Laura gave a talk on guppy maternal effects at the Behaviour 2017 conference in Estoril, Portugal.

We also welcomed three REU students into the lab this summer. Check out the “People” tab to get to know them better.

Check back here on the homepage for more updates on outreach, conferences and more as we head into Fall 2017! In the mean time you can keep up with us on  Twitter.  

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!