Congratulations to former EXEB-member Kristina Karlsson-Green and her new large grant

 Posted by Erik Svensson

There are moment's in a senior researcher's career which are especially nice. It can be when one get's a paper accepted. Or when some of your PhD-student's defend their thesis. Or when the student obtain a postdoctoral research grant. Or when the student obtains his or her first large grant or establishes him- or herself as an independent scientist. Perhaps this latter thing is the moment that is especially nice for former advisors.

And this is exactly what has happened to Kristina Karlsson-Green, among us mostly known as "Tina", who just received a prestiguous and very competitive "International Career Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR). This grant amounts to 1.8 million SEK/year for a period for four years, and enables Tina to establish her own research programme at the Agricultural University in Alnarp, where she is currently located, after her first postdoc in Finland in the laboratory of Anna-Liisa Laine.

I feel extremely priviligied to have had so great PhD-students, who have seldom made me disappointed, and who have clearly shown their independence by establishing themselves in the extremely competitive science world. Today I am very proud and happy that Tina can continue her research career - to the benefit of both herself, her current colleagues and to the joy and happiness of myself and all her former research colleagues in EXEB.

Well done Tina! You rock!

EXEB shrinks - but shows overcompensatory growth: introducing new members

Posted by Erik Svensson


EXEB is our own and dynamic research environment, and as such there is (and indeed should be!) a high turnover of new and old members, and a healthy balance between inflow (newcomers) and outflow (migrants). Recently, three co-workers have left us to take up new positions.

Our most recent outgoing migrants from EXEB include Tom Gosden, who has now moved back to Australia to start a DECRA Junior Research Position, Machteld Verzijden who has moved to Aarhus University for a new postdoc and Maren Wellenreuther, who has moved to New Zeeland to commence a position as Senior Scientist at the Plant & Food Research Institute (though Maren will be affiliated to Lund part-time for the coming couple of years). We thank Tom, Machteld and Maren for their time in Lund and wish them good luck in their new positions.

Here, we also welcome some new EXEB members, which are briefly introduced below. First, we are happy to welcome Tobias Uller, who is in the process of establishing himself in Lund as a faculty member at the Biology Department, after obtaining a prestiguous fellowship from The Wallenberg Foundation. This large grant enables him to build a research group in Lund. Tobias has research interests and competence that is largely complementary to already existing expertise within EXEB, and we are looking forward to integrate both him and his forthcoming PhD-students and postdocs to our research environment. His main interests is the role of developmental plasticity in evolution, and he will work with both invertebrates (Daphnia) and reptiles (lizards) to study these important questions.

Tobias Uller

We also welcome our new PhD-student Beatriz Willink, who is from Costa Rica and who has a research background as a herpetologist, with special interests in colour polymorphisms and sexual selection. Beatriz will work under my supervision and will focus on the macroevolutionary consequences of sexual selection and colour evolution in Coenagrionidae ("pond damselflies"), using a combination of field experiments, observations and comparative approaches. She obtained a scholarship from The World Bank to do her PhD in Lund and she has already integrated quite well in to the EXEB environment, as she has been here for one field season and several months.  

Beatriz Willink

Next, we welcome Viktor Nilsson-Örtman as a new incoming postdoc. Viktor recently obtained a postdoctoral research grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR). He will spend the first part of this three-year grant at the University of Toronto in the laboratory of Locke Rowe, before he joins Lund and EXEB. Viktor has a strong background in ecological developmental biology, working with latitudinal variation in larval growth rates of damselflies of the genus Enallagma. Viktors expertise on the larval aquatic life-stage will largely complement our ongoing research on adult odonates, and we are looking forward to bring him in to the EXEB environment. 

                                                                      Viktor Nilsson-Örtman

Another postdoc who will join us now in late September 2014 is Katie Duryea from Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA), who did her PhD in the lab of Ryan Calsbeek, and who has a background as a herpetologist and Anolis-lizard biologist. Katie recently obtained a prestiguous outgoing postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which enables her to spend two years in Sweden and to join EXEB. Katie is interested in postcopulatory sexual selection and sperm competition, and she has a strong bioinformatic and molecular biology background, having worked also in the laboratories of Hopi Hoekstra at Harvard University and with Kelly Zammudio at Cornell University, prior to entering the PhD-programme at Dartmouth. During her postdoc in Lund, Katie will work on postcopulatory sexual selection in the polymorphic damselfly Ischnura elegans, taking advantage of soon available transcriptomic and genomic resources for this species, as well as our large outdoor cages at Stensoffa Field Station. 

Katie Duryea

Finally, we also welcome Rosa Sanchéz, who originally did her PhD at University of Vigo (Spain), and who is currently on her second postdoc in Barcelona, where she currently studies mechanisms of postzygotic isolation in mammals. However, Rosa has a solid background as an odonatologist, having worked in the laboratory of Adolfo Cordero during her PhD. Rosa will study the genomic signature of  hybridiziation between Ischnura elegans and its sister species I. graellsii in Spain. Last year, she obtained a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the EU, which enables her to come to Lund and join EXEB in spring 2015. 

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 Rosa Sanchéz

Anna Runemark receives postdoctoral research grant from the Swedish Research Council

It is with great pleasure and happiness that we note that Anna Runemark, who defended her PhD-student in May earlier this year, has received a prestiguous postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR). Congratulations Anna! This requires celebration with some sparkling wine at tomorrow's lab-meeting (December 11 at 10.30). The new postdoctoral grant system means that Anna will be employed at the Biology Department in Lund, being part of our lab, but will work abroad at the University of Oslo (Norway) for two of the coming three years. She will then perform research on the genomic consequences of homoploid hybridization among Passer-sparrows in southern Europe. 

Anna's achievement is well-deserved and impressive, particularly in the light of the severe competition for such grants (23 % success rate). To my knowledge, Anna was the only evolutionary biologist this year who got such a postdoc among the natural sciences in Sweden. Anna's achievement is hers, and hers only, but as a former PhD-advisor I do of course take some pride too, and takes the opportunity to boost my already big ego a bit further. I am glad that Anna keeps up my good statistics in terms of former PhD-students who get VR-postdocs: She is number five, out of five in total, resulting in a 100 % success rate (future students in this lab should take it as an encouragement and not feel stressed about it, I hope). 

We also have several other reasons to celebrate tomorrow: our postdoc Maren Wellenreuther got a "Junior Researcher" grant from VR earlier in November this year, and I myself also got a four-year grant from the same agency. Further, Jessica Abbott recently got 380 000 SEK for  buying equipment to the fly lab, and Maren got 100 000 SEK from the "Nilsson-Ehle Foundation". All in all a very successful year for the lab members in terms o grants, and hopefully this will continue in the near future. 

These are achievements we all should be proud of, whether we actually got a grant or not ourselves, as research is a collective enterprise and scientists do not work in isolation. One colleague's success can largely be attributed to his/her colleagues too, who have contributed to create an intellectually and scientifically stimulating research environment, and this is true whether you are a PhD-advisor, professor, lecturer, postdoc, PhD- or Master's student. 

Congratulations to Maren Wellenreuther for obtaining "Junior Project Grant"

The Swedish Research Council (VR) recently announced its grants decision for 2012, and I am happy to congratulate one of our lab-members and current postdoc Maren Wellenreuther, to have obtained a "Junior Project Grant" for the next four years. These highly attractive but competitive grants is one way of entering the job market and path towards a research or faculty position in Sweden. Competition was severe this year, as previous years, with only about 16 % of all applications being granted. Well done Maren! It will be exciting to follow Marens research the coming  years, which will focus on chromosomal inversions and evolutionary divergence in seaweed flies around the coasts of Scandinavia.

Last year Jessica Abbott got a similar grant, and it continues to go very well for young researchers both within our lab and in the rest of the Biology Department in Lund. I also encourage those of you who applied this year and did not get a grant (no one mentioned, but nobody forgotten), to not give up but try again next year. Competition is severe, and margins are often tight, but it is necessary to be persistent and believe in one's idéas. I, for myself, is also very happy and grateful that I got a grant this year, and I am looking forward to not have to apply for a while, but concentrate on research.

Lastly, I would like to congratulate former PhD-student Anna Runemark, who recently got one of her thesis-papers accepted in Molecular Ecology: a study on the relationship between inbreeding depression and secondary sexual character divergence in islant populations of Podarcis-lizards. I wish Anna all luck as she awaits the postdoctoral grant decisions from VR and EU/Marie Curie later this year. 

A new postdoctoral co-worker: Welcome Machteld Verzijden!

I am pleased to announce that our laboratory will get another postdoc from 2010: Machteld Verzijden was awarded a postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) this spring. Her research interests are focussed on animal behaviour, in particular animal communication systems and the role of learned mate preferences in sexual selection and speciation.

Machteld has previous research experience from birds (zebra finches) and fish (African mouthbrooding cichlids). It is a very talented young scientist that will soon join our laboratory, with some recent interesting and impressive publications in journals like Current Biology and Evolution. In Lund, Mactheld will study the mechanisms of mate preference learning in Calopteryx- damselflies, which will fit well in to our past and ongoing studies about the interplay between gene flow, sexual isolation and plasticity in mate preferences in these insects.

Machteld received her Ph.D. from Leiden University under the supervision of Prof. Carel Ten Cate. During her Ph.D., she did experimental work on the role of social learning in adult mate preferences in cichlid fish, as well as population genetic modelling work together with Prof. Maria Servedio, a leading theoretical evolutionary biologist. Currently, she is on her first postdoctoral stay in Texas, working on sexual selection and communication in fish in the laboratory of Prof. Gill Rosenthal. Machteld will thus bring some new insights and perspectives from her background in ethology and animal psychology, which will nicely complement the general ecological and population genetic focus of our current research.

As an aside, I note that I have been lucky to have been able to recruit so many good co-workers that have been so succesful in obtaining postdoctoral grants from VR: apart from Machteld, also Maren Wellenreuther, Thomas Gosden and Jessica Abbott have been succesful in obtaining these highly attractive and competitive postdoctoral grants. Although I cannot take much credit for Mactheld and Marens past achievements in any respect, given that their Ph.D.:s were obtained in other laboratories than mine, I sincerely hope that we will be equally succesful in the future. I also find it interesting that Machteld is my second "fish-postdoc" (the first one was Maren). I have yet to publish my first fish paper (if it will ever happen), and it is nice with people who are brave to switch study organisms. It is also, most likely, a good career move.