Jessica passed her oral exams this morning!  If you weren't able to make it to the celebration, be sure to congratulate her next time you see her.  We had a champagne toast in the lab, followed by lunch at Phil's Sliders

Lisa has been awarded the Colman Fellowship for 2013-2014.  This is a highly competitive award that ESPM gives to graduate students working on watershed issues.  

Teri Markow and I have a chapter comparing patterns of diversification in Hawaiian Drosophila and the cactophilic repleta species group.

Our paper on "Fungal diversity associated with Hawaiian Drosophila host plants" has been accepted in PLoS ONE.  Congratulations to Brian Ort for leading this effort, along with two undergraduate researchers in the lab, Norma Pantoja and Roxanne Bantay!

Lisa Marrack passed her oral exams with flying colors, followed by a celebratory lunch at Jupiter.  Congratulations Lisa!

Over the weekend we heard that two papers had been accepted.  One, lead by Darren Obbard at the University of Edinburgh, examines dating in the Drosophilidae using several Hawaiian calibration points.  It will be appearing in Molecular Biology and Evolution.


The other is a survey of Wolbachia in endemic Hawaiian insects (see Figure) that will be out in Fly. The paper was coauthored by Gordon Bennett and former undergraduate Norma Pantoja.

We were invited to submit a full NSF proposal on the ecology and phylogenetics of the genus Scaptomzya.  We're working with Noah Whiteman and Rick Lapoint at the University of Arizona.  This work will examine the biogeography and phylogeny of Scaptomyza in Hawaii and throughout the world.  

Check for updates on our new project site: http://scaptomyza.drosophilaevolution.com/

Congratulations to all the lab members who are graduating this year.  Gordon received his PhD and will be moving on to a postdoctoral position in Nancy Moran's Lab at Yale.  Crystal got her Bachelor's degree in Molecular Toxicology and is applying to Pharmacy School.  Best of luck to you both in the future! 

We're going to celebrate the end of the semester at Chester's Bay View Cafe this Thursday, 3 May, at 4:00.

First year graduate student Jessica Craft received honorable mention for her NSF GRFP and Ford Foundation proposals.