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. 

Lab-meeting on how to write a succesful application to VR: Part 2

On Wednesday November 16 (update: 13.00!), we will have a follow-up lab-meeting about strategies how to write a succesful application to VR, particularly in relation to the new form of grant directed to young researchers: "Junior Project Grants". This time, we  have invited two of the succesful grantees this year: Jessica Abbott, and Olof Hellgren.

Both these young scientists will participate in the lab-meeting and share their experiences about the application process and participate in the discussion. They will also tell us a little about their projects and what they want to do in the future.

I will start the discussion by re-iterating some of the general points and messages from the previous meeting, and give some reflections of this year's outcome and what it might mean for the future.To celebrate Olof and Jessica, some "bubbly" champagne-like drink will be served, and Machteld has promised to bring some "fika".

I would also like to point out an interesting blog post about how to be succesful in writing research grant on the blog "The Professor is in". I got the hint about this blog from Brazilian graduate student Marcos Robalinho Lima. The particular post is entitled "Dr. Karen's Foolproof Grant Template" and you can find it here.


Time and place: Wednesday November 16 at 13.00 at in "Argumentet".

Welcome!

Dr. Jessica Abbott receives "Junior Project Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR) and moves to Lund

Some of the greatest moments of satisfaction in the life and career of scientists and teachers is when former PhD-students are succesful and able to obtain jobs and positions, especially these days with increasingly severe competition for research grants. It is therefore with great pleasure that I now note that Jessica Abbott, currently postdoc at the Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC) in Uppsala, has received a so-called "Junior Project Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR).

As many regular readers of this blog probably already know, Jessica defended her PhD-thesis here in Lund in November 2006, with me as her main advisor. After her PhD-defence, she moved to Queens University (Canada) for a VR-funded postdoc in the laboratory of Adam Chippindale to work on intralocus sexual conflict over wing shape in fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster). She continued working with fruitflies also during her second postdoc in Ted Morrow's lab in Uppsala, but now using more transcriptomic techniques, such as microarrays, to study the expression profile consequences of intralocus sexual conflict.

Jessica will join the Evolutionary Ecology Unit in the Biology Department, and start up her own independent research project on intralocus sexual conflict in simultaneous hermaphrodites, using experimental evolution approaches on marine flatworms (see picture above), in collaboration with Lucas Schärer. We will hopefully hear more about these plans in a few weeks, as Jessica will come to this year's Christmas Meeting and party in the Evolutionary Ecology Unit. Jessica has also promised to write a blogpost soon where she will inform us a bit more. She will also come to our weekly lab-meeting on November 16, to share her experience on how to obtain a Junior Project Grant from VR (more info in a forthcoming blogpost).

The fact that Jessica now will bee able to establish herself as an independent senior researcher is not only good for herself, but also for the rest of us, as a new intellectual force with novel research techniques and study organisms  will come to us in Lund. Jessica will thus join our lab soon and will of course be active at lab-meetings and (hopefully) also soon be able to recruit PhD-student(-s) and/or postdocs.

As Jessica now will become another Principal Investigator (PI), I think that time is now very mature to re-name this blog ("Erik Svensson Research Laboratory"), which is to focussed on only one person, to something more general, which captures both mine and Jessica's research, and also opens up for future recruitments and establishments of new PI:s.

Ideally, a new name for this blog should be long-lasting, general, independent of study organisms or techniques, yet still capture the essence of research interests among the PI:s, postdocs and PhD-students. It could very well be a name consisting of several words, even an acronym, as the case of some of our sister blogs at other universities, like the  Eco-Evo, Evo-Eco, which was started by Andrew Hendry at McGill University, but which is a true group blog for his co-workers, just like I want this one to become in the future.

I therefore congratulate Jessica once again, and declare the competition for a new blog name that captures current and future research interests of this group open! There is no deadline to come in with suggestions, and you could either tell me directly, or write in the comments below this blog posts. I have already one possible name in mind, which I have discussed with Jessica, but wanted everyone to have the chance to come in with suggestions before I decide. There is no jury, and I am the only judge. Good arguments will be considered, especially if they take in to account the factors that I listed above (generality, likely duration and the possibility of future recruits and new PI:s).

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.