Congratulations again to Deepa! She was elected Vice President of the American Society of Naturalists. She’ll even get to put together her own VP session at the Society’s 2022 meeting. Way to go!
I am thrilled to say that another former postdoc, Lon Chubiz, will become a tenured Associate Professor in the Biology Department at University of Missouri, St. Louis, as of Fall, 2021. After having also landed an NSF CAREER Award, way to kick butt, Lon!
A paper in Microorganisms by former postdoc, Jessica Lee, now a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, came out earlier this year describing her development of a synthetic community that could degrade model plant-derived compounds. She uncovered myriad metabolic interactions that arose, including formaldehyde toxicity…
I just realized that I never posted the great news from last year that Josh Michener, a former postdoc, won a DOE Early Career Award. This supports his lab’s work at ORNL on “Systems Metabolic Engineering of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans for Lignin Valorization.” Congratulations on the distinction, as…
Shout out to former postdoc, Will Harcombe, on bring promoted to Associate Professor this past summer. Very exciting to see how well things have gone with his lab’s exploration of the evolution of cooperation.
Deepa Agashe, at NCBS in Bangalore, has been awarded one of three “SERB Women Excellence” Awards and was recognized directly by the president. Not that president, but the Indian President, Shri Ram Nath Kovind. As they call out on their website: Dr Deepa Agashe is…
Congrats to Dipti Nayak, who is still in her first year of being an Assistant Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley, on being named one of the 15 Searle Scholars for 2020. She was honored due to exploring “how do archaea produce…
Remember March 1st of this year? Kids were in school and labs were open. As for me, I was about to get on a plane to fly from Copenhagen through to Denver for the American Physical Society (APS) general meeting to give a talk. With…
Yup, I really wrote that. In a lab so strongly influenced by Darwin, I just invoked the name of Lamarck, who is often framed as the anti-Darwin. In no way am I defending any aspect of Lamarck’s support of the “Great chain of being” to…
In the morass of metagenomic sequence data on microbes, it is unclear what a unit should even be in a community. Ideally, one would want to uncover the core populations present: the set of strains that actually are exchanging genetic information and are reasonably cohesive,…