Hearty congratulations to Emilie Richards who successfully defended her masters thesis yesterday! Emilie’s work focuses on characterizing the performance of model assessment tests for phylogenomic datasets. She gave a great talk on an interesting, important project that she’ll be submitting for publication shortly, so stay tuned!
Great job Emilie!
Participants in the Summer 2016 Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program will take advantage of high-throughput DNA sequencing and phylogenetic methods to study the identity and origins of Hawai?i’s native, endemic and invasive organisms. REU participants will be mentored by a diverse faculty from the departments of Biology, Botany, and Microbiology, the Hawai‘i Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and Kapi‘olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.The 10-week REU summer program provides participants with stipends of $5,250, and covers the costs of accommodations, food and travel to Hawaii. This unique experience allows participants to gain hands-on research experience, providing an excellent stepping stone for future graduate studies.Applications for Summer 2016 are due March 15, 2016. Please visit the program website for further information and to apply.Questions can be addressed to program coordinators Dr. Stuart Donachie (donchie@hawaii.edu) and Dr. Stephanie Kraft-Terry (kraft2@hawaii.edu).
Good times at Kaimana Beach to kick off the new semester and say farewell to Adrián.
This semester we have several new undergrads working in the lab. Sam Fisher is performing field surveys for snake-eyed skinks on Oahu, and Ann Marsolais is studying DNA degradation in preserved tissue samples. If you are interested in hearing more about these projects or others going on in the lab, I’ve been posting project updates on my website.
Herp Night this month will take place at the Bishop Museum. Curator of Herpetology Allen Allison will be talking about his research on the reptiles and amphibians of New Guinea. The talk will start at 6:30 pm, should be fun!
Herp night this month will take place 6pm Thursday on the 3rd floor of Edmondson Hall. Anthony Barley will be talking about his PhD work exploring species diversity in sun skinks in Southeast Asia as well as some history of herpetology in the Philippines.
Fijian iguana. Photo courtesy Robert Fisher.
I am very happy to welcome Robert Fisher from the San Diego USGS field station as our first herp night speaker of the academic year. Robert will be talking about his extensive field work and research in Fiji.
We’ll kick things off around 4:30 on the Edmondson 3rd floor lanai with pau hana drinks and light pupus and move on to the presentation between 5 and 5:30. Hope to see you there.
We were happy to host a visit from the UH Manoa Children’s Center the other day. The class brought by their pet turtle turtle, George, and had some fun interacting with other animals that are around the lab. Two year olds have a lot of energy!
