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. 

Congratulations to Fabrice Eroukhmanoff for obtaining postdoctoral EU-fellowship ("Marie Curie")

Former PhD-student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff, who is currently postdoc at CEES in Oslo (Norway) has apparently obtained a postdoctoral scholarship from the European Union through the "Marie Curie"-programme. As he recently obtained a two-year postdoctoral scholarship from the Swedish Research Council (VR), this means that he can stay longer in Oslo and be able to do more research, before possibly returning to Sweden.

On behalf of myself, as proud former advisor, and the rest of us, I wish to congratulate Fabrice for yet another impressive achievement. Well done!

Happy New Year!

I hereby wish all my co-workers (students, PhD-students, postdocs and colleagues) a Happy New Year 2011! I certainly hope that the new year will be as succesful as the previous was, for many of us. Apart from several good publications in excellent journals (BMC Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, J. Evol. Biol., TREE to mention only a few) I would also like to highlight some other great highlights (to me personally):

1. Kristina Karlsson succesfully defended her PhD in November and have already published most of her thesis-papers. Well done!

2. Fabrice Eroukhmanoff got a postdoctoral 2-year grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) to go to Norway (Oslo University) and work with Glenn-Pether Saethre and Thomas F. Hansen.

3. Machteld Verzijden found out, just before Christmas, that she will stay in our lab for 2-3 more years, due a postdoctoral scholarship from the Wenner-Gren Foundations.

4. Former postdoc Shawn Kuchta got a faculty position at Ohio University (Athens, USA), and started up his new lab from the beginning of September 2010. Sophia Engel visited him during November, and I will myself go there for a visit in April 2011.

Needless to say: I am proud to work with such a group of excellent and dedicated scientists as you guys! Although academic life is stressful and we compete (like all other groups) for grants and to get our papers published in good journals, I think we are doing remarkably well, as a lab and as a group. I think this is because we regularly meet and discuss science - in a friendly and cooperative atmosphere. This is the key to sucess - much more than large research grants. I hope we can continue along this succesful path for many years to come.

As for myself, I will now leave for South Africa (well, tomorrow!), and will be back in the last week of January. Until then; enjoy this picture of a Greater Collared Sunbird, photographed in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa in April this year. My overly ambitious daughter My (who is soon a professional blogger and expert in HTML-programming, by the way), has started up a new photo blog, where she wants us both to upload our photos during the trip to South Africa. You can find it here.

I am not sure I will allocate that much time as my daughter expects me to, as I want to stay away from the internet for a while, when enjoying field work, good wine, birds and wildlife. But keep following this other blog, perhaps I will change my mind :).

What could one do with 250 000 SEK? A stepping stone towards a thermal image camera

Well, today I found out that I was awarded 250 000 SEK from The Crafoord Foundation, which is for an application I did send in this winter to buy a thermal image camera. This type of camera does of course cost more (around 400 000), but it is at least a start, and hopefully more money from other funding sources will come in so that I can eventually buy it to my research laboratory.

As some of you already know, I am interested in thermal image camera as a novel tool to quantify insect thermoregulation, and relate such variation to other interesting things, such as genotypes, phenotypes (e. g. wing colouration patterns), species or heritable colour morphs.

One recent scientific application where such an IR-camera has been used has been to look at differences between pygmy phenotypes in humans and normal-sized people (see picture above). One of the hypotheses for the evolution of small stature in many populations of humans inhabiting rainforest environments across the globe (Asia, Africa, South America) has been that short men and women do not have as much trouble with excess heat as tall men and women. This thermoregulation hypothesis, as well as other adaptive hypotheses for the evolution of the pygmy phenotype was recently discussed in a TREE-review by Perry and Dominier.

Back to the Crafoord Foundation. Although I am somewhat disappointed that I did not get the full amount I applied for, I am definitely happy that my hard-working scientific "Animal Ecology"-colleagues Staffan Bensch, Anders Hedenström and Susanne Åkesson also got grants from Crafoord. Money is not everything in research. But with money one can (sometimes!) do good research.