Happy New Year!

I hereby wish all my co-workers (students, PhD-students, postdocs and colleagues) a Happy New Year 2011! I certainly hope that the new year will be as succesful as the previous was, for many of us. Apart from several good publications in excellent journals (BMC Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, J. Evol. Biol., TREE to mention only a few) I would also like to highlight some other great highlights (to me personally):

1. Kristina Karlsson succesfully defended her PhD in November and have already published most of her thesis-papers. Well done!

2. Fabrice Eroukhmanoff got a postdoctoral 2-year grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) to go to Norway (Oslo University) and work with Glenn-Pether Saethre and Thomas F. Hansen.

3. Machteld Verzijden found out, just before Christmas, that she will stay in our lab for 2-3 more years, due a postdoctoral scholarship from the Wenner-Gren Foundations.

4. Former postdoc Shawn Kuchta got a faculty position at Ohio University (Athens, USA), and started up his new lab from the beginning of September 2010. Sophia Engel visited him during November, and I will myself go there for a visit in April 2011.

Needless to say: I am proud to work with such a group of excellent and dedicated scientists as you guys! Although academic life is stressful and we compete (like all other groups) for grants and to get our papers published in good journals, I think we are doing remarkably well, as a lab and as a group. I think this is because we regularly meet and discuss science - in a friendly and cooperative atmosphere. This is the key to sucess - much more than large research grants. I hope we can continue along this succesful path for many years to come.

As for myself, I will now leave for South Africa (well, tomorrow!), and will be back in the last week of January. Until then; enjoy this picture of a Greater Collared Sunbird, photographed in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa in April this year. My overly ambitious daughter My (who is soon a professional blogger and expert in HTML-programming, by the way), has started up a new photo blog, where she wants us both to upload our photos during the trip to South Africa. You can find it here.

I am not sure I will allocate that much time as my daughter expects me to, as I want to stay away from the internet for a while, when enjoying field work, good wine, birds and wildlife. But keep following this other blog, perhaps I will change my mind :).