Thankyou, goodbye and good luck Mireia, Skye, Tammy and Anna!

 

(Photos shamelessly stolen from Facebook)

Posted by Erik Svensson 

As some of you already know, we have had some amazing and hard-working undergraduate internship students working in our labs and helping our PhD-students and postdocs who have now left EXEB to continue their education and work elsewhere. You probably already know who I am talking about: Mireia Ballesta (from Spain), Skye Butterson (from South Africa), Tammy Ho (from Singapore, studying at Manchester University, UK) and Anna Kell (from Wales, studying at Manchester University, UK). 

Mireia, Skye, Tammy and Anna have all been extremely helpful in both the field and the laboratory, helping and assisting mainly Anna Nordén, John Waller and Beatriz Willink in their day-to-day research. As an advisor of John and Beatriz I am of course very happy to see them getting this  help, and also getting training in teaching and advising, and I think I speak also for Jessica Abbott, who is main advisor for Anna in that respect. 

We have valued your contributions a lot, as well as your enthusiasm, good working spirit and humour. We wish all four of you good luck in your future careers, and we hope you will keep your time in Lund as one of happy memories. Thankyou!!!!

Lab-meeting in preparation for "Christmas Meeting"

Posted by Erik Svensson

We meet on Tuesday (December 17) to listen to Anna Nordén, John Waller and perhaps also Qinyang Li to present the final version of their talks on the "Christmas Meeting" of the Evolutionary Ecology Unit (18-19 December). This will be a chance for Anna, John and Qinyang to get some final constructive input on their talks, and for the rest of us to come with constructive suggestions in a friendly atmosphere.

Note that both time  and location of the lab-meeting has been changed, due to teaching commitments on my part. The new time and place is:

Tuesday December 17 at 14.15 in seminar room "Communis" (3rd floor, Ecology Building).

Most welcome!

Happy New 2013!

Posted by Erik Svensson

The year 2012 is now behind us, and we are looking forward to 2013. The past year was, I dare to say, extremely successful in terms of grant applications, good publications, events and activities. To mention just a few things: three new postdocs joined the lab (Yuma, Lesley, Natsu), one PhD-student defended her thesis in May (Anna Runemark), one postdoc got a "Junior Project Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (Maren) and Jessica got a large grant from the Crafoord Foundation, that has made it possible for her to recruit a new PhD-student to work on the flatworm experimental evolution project. I myself, got a large grant from The Swedish Research Council too, which I am of course very happy for. I certainly hope that 2013 will be as successful, for all of us, as was 2012. Well done, all of you!

Among publications, I could mention some nice papers in Ecology, Molecular Ecology and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, but there are certainly more. I was also happy to get my new volume "The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology" out at Oxford University Press (co-edited with Ryan Calsbeek from Dartmouth College, USA). 

Below are some pictures from the past year. Keep up the good work, friends!

In December, postdoc Lesley Lancaster visited Erik in Dalby to run some generalized linear models in "R" to investigate the role of temperature on mating conflicts in the polymorphic damselfly Ischnura elegans. 

Earlier in December, lab members from EXEB and other colleagues at the Evolutionary Ecology Unit went for our annual Christmas Meeting. Here John, Jasmine and Anna Nordén enjoy the Christmas Table in the evening after the talks. 

And here are Jessica and Yuma in the same evening.

In January and February, Erik went to South Africa for field work with odonates in the Western Cape Province with Master's student Anna Nordén (right) and undergraduate Johanna Eklund (left). Here they both enjoy some of the wine of the Stellenbosch district. 

The arrival of our two Japanese postdocs Yuma and Natsu in May enabled us to start up some new projects, including one on Wing Interference Patterns (WIP:s) in Drosophila melanogaster and their role in mate choice and sexual selection. Here we see Yuma, Natsu, Jessica and Jostein Kjarandsen in the lab, doing mate choice trials (Erik is behind the camera). 

Lab-member in the news: Nordén sister duo shows the power of biology studies in Lund

Our Master's student Anna Nordén, who is working with assortative mating in Calopteryx, made it in to the media this week, in the daily newspaper "City". Above, you can see Anna's happy face (well, Anna is actually ALWAYS happy!) when asked about her summer plans. I especially liked that she emphasized that we only work when it is nice outside and that one actually can get PAID to do this kind of stuff (or even get student loans from CSN). But best of all is of course the summary blob in the right corner that says it all: "Ska fånga trollsländor". Cheers to you Anna: you are an excellent ambassador for our research lab!

Remarkably: Anna's sister Elsa Nordén (also a biology student) is also on the front cover of the same issue of City, these Nordén sisters are really media celebrities.