Igår bjöd Bodil Enoksson på ost och vin för att fira sin pensionering. Många kom för att (mer …)
Vincenzo Ellis – new postdoc
I recently received funding from the Carl Tryggers Foundation to begin a postdoc project with Staffan Bensch. I will work on the genetics and evolution of host specificity in malaria parasites of birds.
I’m originally from San Diego, California. I did my undergraduate work at UC Santa Barbara and my PhD at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. From there I moved to Belo Horizonte, Brazil for a mostly teaching postdoc at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
Olivier van Aken – new senior lecturer
I have just started at LU as a new senior lecturer in the Molecular Cell Biology Unit. I was born in Belgium and completed my PhD at Ghent University. In 2007, I moved to the University of Western Australia to continue my research as a post-doc and Research Assistant Professor. Having returned to Europe, my new lab will be focusing on how plants perceive and respond to external stress conditions, ranging from heat and water stress, to pathogen infection, and even response to physical contact (so-called ‘touch’ responses). In particular, the role of energy converting organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts will be studied during stress response, and how they can influence cellular signalling and gene expression through organelle-to-nuclear ‘retrograde’ signalling. The second main research area is to understand the molecular basis of how plants can change gene expression, hormone levels and downstream morphological changes within minutes of being touched. Indeed, plants are well aware of even gentle physical manipulation, for instance by rain drops falling on a leaf, or just a brief touch with a finger. This is thought to prepare the plant for further potential danger such as wounding and infection, but also changes in environmental conditions such as light, wind and rainfall.
Victoria Twort – new postdoc
Victoria’s interests are in applying genomic techniques to organisms in order to better understand evolutionary relationships and the patterns and processes of molecular evolution and diversification both at intra- and inter-specific levels. Victoria completed her PhD at The University of Auckland, New Zealand with Thomas Buckley and Richard Newcomb. For her thesis, she used genomics techniques to investigation various evolutionary aspects of weta biology. In particular, she looked at molecular evolutionary patterns associated with alpine adaptation, de novo assembly of a giant weta genome and undertook a conservation genetic analysis of three threatened species. Victoria has now started working as a postdoc with Niklas Wahlberg on Lepidoptera phylogenomics.
Biologins dag i jubileumstappning
I år gjorde Biologins dag come back efter att tagit paus under 2016. Mycket var nytt – ny projektledare (Emily Baird), nytt ställe (Biologihuset), inledande magnoliaplantering och (mer …)
It’s not great weather, it’s BLAM weather
Last week it was time for the yearly PhD student conference BLAM. Like every year before, the weather was great, nearly like summer. It’s fortunate that the talks were (mer …)
Magnus Lindh – new postdoc
I started working as a post doc in March together with Jörgen Ripa and Jacob Johansson in ThePEG, at the Evolutionary Ecology unit. Last year I defended my thesis in computational mathematics at Umeå University in northern Sweden. My research is about understanding bumblebee coexistence and response to environmental change. To do this I use optimization and techniques from adaptive dynamics. Our basic assumption is that bumblebees compete for many flower resources which have different peaks during a season. The question is if and how the bumblebees will specialize in a flower resource, and how the resources will coevolve with the bumblebees.
Maria Svensson Coelho – new research engineer
I am returning to Sweden after nearly two decades abroad. I completed my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley in California, my Masters and PhD at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, and then did two post-docs in Brazil – one at the University of São Paulo and another at São Paulo Federal University in Diadema. Since my undergraduate years, my focal study system has been avian malaria. I’ve been involved in research on these organisms’ community ecology, biogeography, and host specificity, among other things.
With my current position, I am switching gears to work with experimental evolution. I will work with Charlie Cornwallis, Karin Rengefors, Erik Svensson, and Tobias Uller, but for the first couple of years I will be focusing on the Chlamydomonas multicellularity project lead by Charlie and Karin. Markus Lindh, a new postdoc here, has already provided an excellent summary of the project aims on Biologibloggen if you’re interested in knowing more about it.
Spring arrived right in time for the winter meeting
This Wednesday and Thursday, Biodiversity had their yearly winter meeting. This time it was in Smygehuk. Around 50 persons from the unit, the Biology museum and (mer …)
Making an impact with research
The GENECO winter meeting was held Tuesday, February 14. PhD students, postdocs and senior researchers, in total 44, attended the meeting at Ideon Science Park. Most participants were from Lund but a few came from Gothenburg and Kalmar to attend.
(mer …)
Ekologikonferens i dagarna tre
Mellan den 7 och 9 februari var det fullt med ekologer i Lund. Det var det årliga svenska Oikos-mötet. Redan i måndags smygstartade vi (mer …)
Jan Olsson – new research journalist
Hi everybody!
My name is Jan Olsson and I’ve just started working at the Department of Biology as a research journalist. For many years I worked as a reporter and news editor at different media companies. For the last year I have been a press officer at the Faculty of Science at Lund University. My role at the Department of Biology involves working with text presentations and news for the department’s website.
Catch people’s interest
One of my first tasks is to write web presentations in Swedish for each research group at the department. The goal is to make sure that the public and your colleagues get relevant information presented in an interesting way on each group’s web page. Later, I will also work with individual researchers’ web pages. In other words, I will, in close cooperation with you, write presentations similar to popular summaries.
Make your research known
As well as working with presentations for the web, I’ll also keep my eyes open for news mainly based on your findings and research. The news will be published on the department’s website. In order to do this I will need your help. A lot depends on you as to whether or not your findings will reach out to a wider public. Very often I will not know anything about your research if you do not tell me. So please get in touch!
Kommentarer