– News –

June 2023: Lots of updates. Sadly for us (but great for them) some awesome undergrads are graduating and moving on best of luck.

Rachel Reeb gave a brilliant Ph.D. defense and will soon begin a Postdoc at The Carnegie Museum of Natural History with Mason Heberling.

We submitted three manuscripts ! Lacey’s paper on duckweed and cyanotoxin tolerance, Swapna’s field duckweed herbivory study, and Taylor work on how management can cause the evolution of higher invasibility.

The Math-Bio Conference I helped organized was a success and we heard fantastic talks from several excellent people.

March 2023: Recently, Thomas’s study on how polyploidy impacts population performance appeared in New Phytologist. Our paper on new microsats for duckweed is in press at Genetic Resources (preprint). I was part of team that created a field research safety manual, and a manuscript on how to create your own,  with special consideration for team members that may be at a higher risk due to their identities, beliefs, and health (Methods in Ecology & Evolution).

Feb 2002: Honored to have spoken at the Gordon Research Conference on Speciation in beautiful Tuscany.

Fall 2022: Jae our amazing research tech left to start her Ph.D. at Rutgers with Ceasar Rodriguez-Saona.

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Sep 2021: Sergio and Lacey’s work on how Dicamba drift impacts vegetative and reproductive traits (and their recovery) in RCBr in Science of the Total Environment

March 2021: Jiaqi’s study manipulating duckweed biofilm evolution and composition, and testing their impacts on multigenerational fitness is out in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Feb 2021: Our collaborative paper on the links between speciation and species coexistence is now out in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Winter 2021: We welcome a new postdoc Dr. Thomas Anneberg, co-mentored with Dr. Tia-Lynn Ashman. He joins us from Kari Segraves lab at Syracuse University.

Fall 2020: We are recruiting a PhD student to work on the NSF funded project testing the rapid evolution of species coexistence. Applications are due in late fall but please contact be beforehand if you are interested.

- Swapna’s first paper is published quantifying water lily aphid preference and performance on various duckweed species. See it here in Ecological Entomology

July 2020: Sadly we bid farewell to our first postdoc Dr. Jiaqi Tan moving on the LSU and undergrads Swapna Subramanian moving on to U. Connecticut and Lillian Leak going to Penn State.

Jan 2020: NSF is supporting our continued research on the dynamic interplay between competition, evolution, and species coexistence.

Jan 2020: New freshman undergrads getting early research experience, welcome Anna!

Sept 2019: Dr. Sergio Ramos has joined our and the Ashman lab as a PEEP postdoc all the way from Zurich.

Sept 2019: New group of curious undergrads join the lab. Welcome JinJin, Erin, Olivia and Jared.

July 2019: The extended lab family has grown. +2 for lab PI fitness :0)

June 2019: We welcome our second graduate student Lacey Rzodkiewicz to work on algal duckweed interactions.

Jan 2019: After a number of years setting up the system and running experiments the first duckweed paper is out in PNAS! Many more to come.

Jan 2019: This year we have undergrads Julie Kerstetter, Shourya Mukherjee, & Rebecca Alvarez joining the lab.

Aug 2018: Welcome Taylor! Our first graduate student. Looking forward to many years of fun research together. 

ESA 2018:  Great science and fun times catching with old colleagues

July 2018: Very happy to welcome our first postdoc Jiaqi Tan! He will be working multiple projects. 

Feb 2018: We welcome Lillian Leak and Julie Everett to the lab!

Dec 2017: New collaborative paper out on what we can learn about eco-evolutionary dynamics using genomics https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0385-2

Sept 2017: The lab continues to grow. We welcome 3 new undergraduate researchers: Kaila, Jacob, and Swapna!

Sept 2017: The inaugural Tree Rivers Evolution Event was a big success! We had 168 attendees from 38 institutions. Great talks, posters, networking, and a fascinating keynote.

Summer 2017: I had a great time on the West Coast this summer giving talks at CSEE (Victoria, Canada), Evolution and ESA (both in Portland). 

Aug 2017: David and Ashley have just given their first poster presentations! Great job and a first for the new lab. 

Long time observer first time twitterer(?): I have finally joined twitter! I will try to restrict my tweets to lab news, science, education, and Pitt. Check it out:  @Exp_EvoEco 

April 2017: The lab has grown! We welcome Josh Armstrong our new Research Technician as well as Ashley Morris and David Conover both undergraduate summer researchers. 

Feb. 13th 2017: I am heading out to the Univ. of Texas at Arlington this week and Virginia Tech, in early March, for departmental seminars. Let me know if you are nearby and want to meet.  

January 2017:  I have started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh!  Now it is time to grow the lab!

December 5th:  The theme issue on ‘Human influences on evolution, and the ecological and societal consequences’ is now published in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B.  My colleagues and I have published a review paper and a data paper on the eco-evolutionary consequences of domestication and agriculture (publications).