I was recently notified that I made Molecular Ecology‘s top 300 reviewers for the past year! Three hundred sounds like a lot, but this is the top cream 8% of all reviewers over the past year. One becomes a “top reviewer” based on “an index that included the number of reviews completed, the proportion of accepted review requests that led to a review being returned (excluding unassignments before the two week deadline), and the average time taken per review if this was over two weeks”. It’s good to know that your anonymous efforts get noticed by someone!
Category Archives: News
DDIG Acquired!!
I got the AWESOME phone call a couple weeks ago from a NSF program officer with the notification that my NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant application to study hybrid zones in Liolaemus was funded!! I will be returning to Argentina in the fall to collect lizards in three hybrid zones with fine-scale sampling. Read more about this research in my research page.
Fieldwork in Argentina
I have just come back from two weeks of field work in Chubut province, Argentina. My collaborator (Luciano Avila) and I were based out of Puerto Madryn, but we made daily excursions eastward to sample a putative hybrid zone involving Liolaemus melanops and Liolaemus chehuachekenk. These samples will be used to examine comparative genomic divergences between 5 species of Liolaemus. Besides catching lizards, I saw many other cool animals including flamingos, penguins, vipers, southern sea lions, and elephant seals! You can read my post about this trip at the Burke Museum blog, and see more photos and videos on facebook!
NSF DDIG Submitted!
I have just submitted an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant! I am requesting funds to examine hybrid zone dynamics and speciation within a radiation of Liolaemus lizards in South America. Funding rates have been pretty good over the past 35 years, so let’s hope that it comes through for me this time! Good luck to everyone else who is also applying!
New pre-print article on gene flow available
Myself, along with my advisor (Adam Leaché) and collaborators in Texas, Mexico, and Colombia, have just submitted a manuscript for review that examines the spatial and temporal extent of gene flow in the Sceloporus spinosus group. We have made the pre-print article available online at Biorxiv, and you can find the article here! If you have any questions on the manuscript or would like to see the supplemental files, let me know!
Article describing fieldwork during Phrynosoma sherbrookei trip published!
Shortly after returning from a collecting trip with Adam in Mexico of June 2012, I wrote a short article/story titled “Cloudy with a chance of lizards” that was featured on the Burke Museum‘s blog (you can find that article here). After the new species of horned lizard was described in this article, we were contacted by staff at the journal Phrynosomatics to publish a little more information on the new species. I sent them my article, and they loved it! It was just published in the August issue of Phrynosomatics, and you can find the article here!
Runner-up for grad. student award at JMIH 2014!
A few members of the Leaché lab (Charles Linkem, Matt McElroy, and P.I. Adam) have just returned from the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Chattanooga, TN. All of us successfully presented our own research, and I upped the ante by entering the Herpetologists’ League graduate student award competition. I was happy with my talk (titled “Those dammed frogs: investigating the impacts of river dams on the micro-population genetic structure of the coastal tailed frog (Ascaphus truei) using thousands of SNPs”), and ended up getting 2nd place out of 20 competitors! The prize was a small check, and a copy of “Snake Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference” that Roy McDiarmid graciously signed for me!
A couple friends and colleagues from U. of Michigan (Pascal Title) and CSU Northridge (including Bobby Espinoza) made it out to Signal Mountain for herping one night. We found seven species, including Eurycea, Plethodon, Bufo, and Carphophis!
Next year, it’s on in Brasil!
Post to UW Biology’s Science Positive
I have just written a post for UW Biology’s blog “SciPos”, AKA Science Positive. I give a little overview of the two publications that have recently come out resulting from my Master’s thesis at San Diego State University. Scroll through other SciPos posts to find out what other grads are doing in the Biology program at the UW!
A new Sceloporus species
Human world, say hello to Sceloporus aurantius! Although this species has indubitably been around for hundreds of thousands to millions of years, it is new to science. Rob Bryson and I have just published a manuscript in the journal Zootaxa describing S. aurantius, a new lizard species in southern Mexico. You can see a preview of the paper here, but let me know if you’d like more information!
Pretty cool to describe a new species in a well-known genus!
Salamander Migration in the News!
A northwestern salamander from Washington State.
I have just been queried by the Sammamish Review about salamander breeding and migrations, specifically, in rural Seattle areas. You can find the full article here! I can only take partial responsibility for some of the statements…