Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the EXEB-lab in Lund!

Posted by Erik Svensson

On behalf of the EXEB-lab in Lund, I wish all co-workers, including all of our students, postdocs, junior researchers, national and international collaborators a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2014! The year has been succesful, with new grants, excellent publications and two new PhD-students accepted in to the group: John Waller, Katrine Lund-Hansen and Anna Nordén. They have both made a strong start in their research careers and we wish them all good luck for the future.

In 2013, there has also been some notable achievements by former postdocs Yuma Takahashi and Lesley Lancaster, who have both obtained research positions in the UK and Japan, respectively. We wish both Yuma and Natsu good luck as they now will hopefully establish themselves as independent researchers at their new universities.

As for myself, I am very happy with they past year, and on the personal level, what gave me most satisfaction was probably winning the photo competition of the journal "Oikos" (see picture below). My pictures of ovipositing emerald damselflies (Lestes sponsa) will now be on the cover of Oikos in 2014, and apparently also be on the new "app" the journal will soon launch.

I used the prize sum (100 GBP) to buy some books at Amazon, including the autobiography of Richard Dawkins: An appetite for wonder: The making of a scientist. Although I am not as huge and uncritical fan of Richard Dawkins as I used to be, I am looking forward to read this one, as I imagine it will be very interesting and thought-provocative.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2012!

 Another year has soon passed, and I wish to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you involved in research in lab. This includes both those of you who are currently in Lund, and those of you who are elsewhere in the world, such as in exotic countries like Norway and Australia.

The pictures above come from the Christmas Meeting in the new Evolutionary Ecology Unit, which was held last week. After talks in the afternoon by several group members and other colleagues in the new unit, it was time for the traditional Swedish Christmas Table, or "Julbord" As you see, Jessica Abbott participated too, after several years of exile in Canada and Uppsala. Jessica will start her new position in Lund in January 2012, after receiving her "Junior Project Grant" from Vetenskapsrådet in 2011. Tina Karlsson also participated, and she will leave to start her postdoc in Finland (Helsinkki) in May 2012.

The year 2011 was an extremely successful year for our lab, in terms of succesful grant applications. Apart from Jessica obtaining a VR-grant and Tina getting a postdoc-grant from VR, Fabrice Eroukhmanoff obtained an EU/Marie Curie postdoc in December, and Machteld Verzijden got extension on her postdoc from the Wennergren Foundation. Considering the severe competition for grants these days, I am both amazed and proud of these achievements of you guys. And you should be as well, of course.

The year 2011 was also  successful in terms of publishing, with nice papers in leading journals, such as Animal Behaviour, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Heredity, Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, to name a few. We are clearly doing work that is interesting and relevant, and I have the feeling we are moving in the right direction to be even more succesful in the coming years.

Once again: Merry Christmas and enjoy the break! See you in 2012!

Soon Christmas and last lab-meeting for this year on December 22 2010

Wednesday 22 will be the last lab-meeting for this year before Christmas, and before I leave for South Africa. I was thinking we should skip a paper this time, and just discuss some general issues and any remaining practicalities before the winter break. I will bring "glögg" (both with and without alcohol!), if somebody else could volunteer to bring "lussekatter" and/or pepparkakor.

Hope to see you in "Darwin" then on December 22. Same time as usual: 10.15.

No lab-meeting this week (9/12)

Due to several other meetings and committments on my side, I am afraid we'll have to cancel the planned lab-meeting this Wednesday (9 December). I will be present in the Ecology Building the whole day, however, in case you need to talk to me in between the meetings. I hope we can have a regular lab-meeting the next week, before the Christmas break (16 December), in case everybody is around then. Please do not hesitate to e-mail me with suggestions for papers to read and discuss!