Saturday, February 9, 2013

Workshop on "Behaviour and Speciation" in Oslo





This is a quick greeting and update from Oslo (Norway), where I have participated in a very stimulating research workshop entitled "Behaviour and Speciation", funded by FroSpects and organized by Glenn-Peter Saetre at CEES (Oslo). There were a number of interesting talks by invited speakers, including from Ole Seehausen, Lee Dugatkin, Darren Irwin and Anna Qvarnström, to mention only a few. It was nice to meet friends and colleauges like Darren who I have not seen for ten years, i. e. since he was postdoc in Lund.

It was also nice to meet former PhD-student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (see picture above), who seems to be doing very well in his new research group and who now works in transgressive hybridization in a homoploid hybrid species of Passer-sparrow and its effects on various phenotypic traits, including beak morphology and beak allometry. Fabrice, Glenn-Peter and several others from the "Sparrow-group" gave several interesting talks about the ongoing work in this fascinating system where genomic, phenotypic and ecological data are now being put together to reveal a complicated but interesting speciation history.

I am writing this post from Fabrice's apartment in Oslo, where I am staying two nights before continuing to North Carolina and the NESCent-meeting about "Environmental determinants of selection". I was of course also pleased to hear that EXEB lab-member in Lund Jessica Abbott have been shortlisted for interview in her application for a "Startup Grant" for junior researcher to the European Research Council (ERC). Well done! An impressive achievement to make it this far, irrespective of the outcome during the interview in Brussels in April, I think.

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