EEB congratulates our graduate students who won awards from UT’s Division of Biology!
Alexander Hollaender Fellowship Award
Zachary Marion (EEB)
Science Alliance Graduate Student Teaching Awards
Phillip Hollingsworth (EEB)
Biology Award
Lacy Chick (EEB)
Daniel Simberloff was honored with the 2014 SEC Faculty Achievement Award, the SEC announced Wednesday. The SEC award recognizes professors from Southeastern Conference schools with outstanding records in teaching and scholarship. Honorees from each university receive a $5,000 honorarium and become their university’s nominee for the SEC Professor of the Year Award, to be recognized at the SEC spring meetings in May and SEC Symposium in September.
For more information, please read the full Tennessee Today article.
EEB Undergraduate Kenna Rewcastle has won a highly-competitive Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research award. Only about 20% of applicants receive funding. Kenna is working with the Classen Lab in Copenhagen. She will be working on the Swedish gradient this summer.
Graduate Student Rafael Zenni has a new paper in Ecology Letters, entitled “Rapid evolution and range expansion of an invasive plant are driven by provenance–environment interactions” (pdf available here). Ecology Letters is the top journal in the ecological sciences.
Rafael D. Zenni, Joseph K. Bailey, and Daniel Simberloff. 2014. “Rapid evolution and range expansion of an invasive plant are driven by provenance–environment interactions.” Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12278.
Sergey Gavrilets recently had paper on “altruistic bullies” come out in Nature Communications:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140326/ncomms4526/full/ncomms4526.html
The work has been discussed in Time Magazine: “Science Proves It: Greed Is Good”
http://time.com/41680/greed-is-good-science-proves/
and in Science Daily: “Altruistic side of aggressive greed”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140326092600.htm
as well as in several international venues. Congrats Sergey!
The Herbarium has completed its move and is in operation on the first floor of the newly renovated Temple Hall (the former student health clinic), at 1818 Andy Holt Ave. We invite you to visit and tour the facility!
Three five-day National Science Foundation Ideas Labs —one for biology, one for engineering, and one for geosciences—are being held this month through April 4 in the Washington, D.C., area. Each lab involves participants from various disciplines and backgrounds, as well as prospective employers and representatives of scientific and professional societies. The goals of the labs are to incubate innovative approaches to improve undergraduate STEM education and produce research agendas that address workforce development needs.
Louis Gross, director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at UT, will serve as director of the Biology Ideas Lab, to be held March 30 to April 4 in Leesburg, Virginia.
Read the full Tennessee Today article.
The EEB website now has a page devoted to Undergraduate Research Opportunities (things like REU’s etc):
eeb.bio.utk.edu/undergraduate-research-opportunities/
To submit opportunities for inclusion on the page, use this Google Form.
Darwin Day in TN was started in 1997 in EEB. This tradition continues this week with movies, information booth, workshops, and other outreach. Notable events include the keynote talk by Harvard’s Andrew Berry on Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, on Tuesday, Feb 11 at 7 pm in UC Auditorium, a lunch talk by Berry about Darwin and human evolution at 12:30 on Tuesday in Buehler 511, and a talk by NIMBioS postdoc Nick Matzke about the intelligent design controversy at 12:30 on Wednesday in Buehler 511. For more information, see darwindaytn.org.
Congratulations to Zach Marion & Ben Fitzpatrick. They just found out that Zach’s NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant will be funded (details below)!
Dissertation Research: Evolutionary complexity and diversity of chemical defenses in diurnal and nocturnal fireflies
Predation is a powerful force driving prey evolution. Recent studies have highlighted that defenses against predators are rarely simple but are instead multivariate, with individual components that are better suited for some predators than others, or that are differentially expressed at different stages of ontogeny. Closely related populations or species may employ qualitatively and quantitatively different defense strategies because of chance or from past or ongoing selection. Thus, two key questions are (i) what factors favor particular defensive strategies and (ii) how are these strategies integrated into the phenotype? Chemically mediated defenses in fireflies provide an excellent system in which to evaluate these questions. Although primarily known for their bioluminescent mate signaling, most fireflies produce an impressive array of cardiac steroids that vary qualitatively (e.g., chemical structure) and quantitatively (e.g., concentrations) within and among populations and species. Yet, little is known about firefly chemical diversity, and how it—and integrated defensive phenotypes in general—evolve. Here we consider whether shifts between diurnal and nocturnal activity (and associated loses or gains of bioluminescence) are accompanied by changes in the mode and tempo of evolution of chemical defenses. We propose to quantify the complexity and diversity of chemical defense compounds in several species, and use a phylogenetic comparative framework to estimate rates of change and patterns of convergence and divergence of chemical phenotypes.