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.

Welcome Lesley Lancaster, our new postdoc

I am pleased to welcome Lesley Lancaster, our new incoming postdoc, funded by BECC ("Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Changing Climate"). Lesley will arrive to Lund in late May or early June, and she will work with me and Bengt Hansson on the population genetics and ecology of range limit evolution, particularly using our favourite model organism: the damselfly Ischnura elegans ("Common Bluetail") as the main study object. Both Bengt and I are very excited about this project and about recruiting Lesley, who will bring with her new skills and perspectives from her previous research.

Currently, Lesley is a postdoctoral scholar at  the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara (California, USA), where she has been since 2009. Her main focus of research has been to reconstruct historical evolutionary processes of adaptation, speciation, extinction and migration using time-calibrated molecular phylogenies of various Californian plant clades. She is also interested in historical habitat tolerances of the unique California chaparral habitat. Her postdoctoral research has resulted in some interesting papers in BMC Evolutionary Biology and Systematic Biology.

Lesley's thesis research was on a quite different topic: maternal effects, reproductive strategies and evolutionary ecology of a colour polymorphic lizard (Uta stansburiana), where she worked in the laboratory of Barry Sinervo at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Her thesis work also resulted in a number of interesting and impressive publications in American Naturalist, Ecology Letters, Evolution and PNAS. 

Lesley is thus an extremely broad and well-rounded biologist and a very experienced postdoc, who has worked at quite different levels of biological organization, and moved her research focus from studies of individual behaviour and evolutionary ecology, to broader macroevolutionary and macroecological questions. It is for precisely these reasons we are excited to bring her in to Lund; she has both sufficient much in common with our already ongoing research,  yet has many complementary skills that will be of interest to us and our research.