It’s been a busy summer, and there’s been a bit of turnover in the lab. Aundrea defended her thesis and headed to Arlington to join Todd Castoe’s Lab, and Jesse has moved to Los Angeles to start his next postdoc with Brad Shaffer. We are all sad to see them go, but excited to see what comes of their next research endeavors.
To balance the departures, we had Brian Folt and Perry (JR) Wood, Jr. join the lab this summer. Brian is working with us to collect comparative genomic data from across the distributions of multiple salamander taxa to delimit species and learn about the biogeography of the Southeastern United States. JR is a collaborator on our NSF funded project to generalize phylogenetics in order test hypotheses about processes of co-divergence in Southeast Asian gekkonid lizards.