Emerging from the fog...

A lot has happened in the past 3 years, including a wonderful (half) sabbatical in Europe for Lila & family, a global pandemic suffered and now optimistically set aside, a mind-expanding AGA Presidential Symposium on selfish evolution (thanks to amazing speakers!!), and many monkeyflowers moving through the field, greenhouse, and lab…

Two new PhD students, Evan Stark-Dykema (Fall 2021) and Natalie Dietz (Fall 2022), have joined the lab. Evan is deep into working on centromeric drive, including both field work and analyses of beautiful new de novo genome assemblies of our flagship M. guttatus lines from DOE-JGI. Natalie has caught the non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) bug from the Sala Lab, and is contemplating a dissertation exploring its roles in life history and stress tolerance in Mimulus. Also in the past year, Colette Berg advanced to PhD candidacy (yay Colette!).