The most popular paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology over the past three years, based on downloads, is “Homosexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development” by Rice, Friberg, and EEB Distinguished Professor Sergey Gavrilets. This paper has been accessed 29,788 times, over fourfold the number of accesses of the next most popular paper in the journal’s history.
Research Assistant Professor Alison Boyer was interviewed today on local NPR station WUOT about her recent PNAS paper about extinctions of birds on Pacific islands. The interview can be heard here.
EEB faculty member Charlie Kwit was recently featured in a video by the Shedd Aquarium about rock iguanas. For more information about the science, see here. The video is embedded below.
Five Six current or incoming EEB students were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships or honorable mentions:
Awards:
Update 2: Angela Chuang has decided to enter EEB in the fall; numbers have been updated to reflect this.
| Institution | Awards + Honorable Mentions |
|---|---|
| University of California-Davis | 16 |
| University of Washington | 13 |
| University of California-Berkeley | 9 |
| University of California-Santa Cruz | 9 |
| Cornell University | 8 |
| University of Minnesota-Twin Cities | 8 |
| Princeton University | 7 |
| Texas A & M University Main Campus | 7 |
| University of Tennessee Knoxville, all departments | 7 |
| University of Tennessee Knoxville, EEB only | 6 |
| Colorado State University | 6 |
| Michigan State University | 6 |
| University of Florida | 6 |
| University of Arizona | 5 |
| University of Colorado at Boulder | 5 |
| University of Georgia | 5 |
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | 5 |
| Utah State University | 5 |
| Indiana University | 4 |
| Oregon State University | 4 |
| University of California-Santa Barbara | 4 |
| University of Chicago | 4 |
| University of Michigan Ann Arbor | 4 |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison | 4 |
| Pennsylvania State Univ University Park | 3 |
| Stanford University | 3 |
| University of California-Los Angeles | 3 |
| University of California-San Diego | 3 |
| University of Montana | 3 |
| University of South Florida | 3 |
| Yale University | 3 |
| Arizona State University | 2 |
| Harvard University | 2 |
| Montana State University | 2 |
| Oklahoma State University | 2 |
| Purdue University | 2 |
| SUNY at Stony Brook | 2 |
| University of California-Irvine | 2 |
| University of Hawaii | 2 |
| University of Idaho | 2 |
| University of Illinois at Chicago | 2 |
| University of Kansas Main Campus | 2 |
| University of Missouri-Columbia | 2 |
| University of Notre Dame | 2 |
| University of Pittsburgh | 2 |
| University of Texas at Austin | 2 |
| University of Utah | 2 |
| University of Vermont & State Agricultural College | 2 |
| Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | 2 |
| American Museum Natural History | 1 |
| Boise State University | 1 |
| Boston University | 1 |
| Central Michigan University | 1 |
| College of William and Mary | 1 |
| Dartmouth College | 1 |
| Emory University | 1 |
| Florida Gulf Coast University | 1 |
| Florida International University | 1 |
| Florida State University | 1 |
| Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology – University of Hawaii Manoa | 1 |
| Humboldt State University | 1 |
| Humboldt State University Foundation | 1 |
| Kent State University | 1 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 1 |
| Miami University | 1 |
| Missouri State University | 1 |
| North Carolina State University | 1 |
| North Dakota State University Fargo | 1 |
| Old Dominion University | 1 |
| Portland State University | 1 |
| Rutgers University New Brunswick | 1 |
| Salisbury University | 1 |
| San Francisco State University | 1 |
| San Jose State University | 1 |
| Syracuse University | 1 |
| Texas State University – San Marcos | 1 |
| Trustees of Boston University | 1 |
| Tufts University | 1 |
| University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus | 1 |
| University of California-Riverside | 1 |
| University of Central Florida | 1 |
| University of Connecticut | 1 |
| University of Maine | 1 |
| University of Massachusetts Amherst | 1 |
| University of Nevada Reno | 1 |
| University of New Hampshire | 1 |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | 1 |
| University of North Carolina at Charlotte | 1 |
| University of Oklahoma Norman Campus | 1 |
| University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras | 1 |
| University of Virginia Main Campus | 1 |
| Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution | 1 |
Institutions with no awards or honorable mentions not listed.
Note that for this table, ecology and systematics correspond to NSF categories “Life Sciences – Ecology”, “Life Sciences – Systematic Biology”.
The 63rd annual Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage is April 23 – 37. It is “an annual five-day event in Great Smoky Mountains National Park consisting of a variety of wildflower, fauna, and natural history walks, motorcades, photographic tours, art classes, and indoor seminars. Most programs are outdoors in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, while indoor offerings are held in various venues throughout Gatlinburg, TN” (from its website). It includes numerous offerings by EEB people, including a mushroom walk with EEB undergrad (and incoming Matheny lab graduate student) Christine Braaten, a talk and ant hike with faculty member Nate Sanders, and a nighttime bat walk by McCracken lab members. Gene Wofford, director of the UT Herbarium and emeritus EEB faculty member, is one of the organizers of the pilgrimage.
Aguiguan, a small island in the Northern Mariana Islands, is home to the only known population of the Emballonura semicaudata rotensis, a subspecies of Pacific sheath-tailed bat. Immediate research is necessary to determine an appropriate approach to its conservation. Two ubiquitous invaders, feral goats and lantana shrub have dense populations on Aguiguan. It is unknown whether these invasive species affect the Pacific sheath-tailed bat.
The grants were funded by Sigma Xi and Bat Conservation International. Jess was also inducted into Sigma Xi as an associate member.
Research assistant professor Barb Banbury and assistant professor Brian O’Meara recently received funding from the Encyclopedia of Life for creating an R interface to parse information from that site. This can be used to identify phylogenetic trends in amount of content for various groups, highlight taxonomic controversies, and in general make this data far more accessible for researchers. All their code is open source and is being developed in public. More information is available here. The figure above shows coverage of various plant species in different databases on a phylogeny of those plants (Asparagales); blue indicates better coverage.
PhD student Jennifer Krauel (a Gary McCracken student) was recently funded by Bat Conservation International for her project, “Identifying insect communities fueling bat migration in an agriculturally important area”. Her project involves high throughput sequencing of bat guano to identify their food sources.
EEB PhD candidate Riley Bernard was featured in the Knoxville News Sentinel for her research on white nose syndrome in bats in Tennessee. The full article is UPDATE: NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Riley is part of the McCracken lab.