5/2/23: The whole lab just finished a month-long outreach project at Meadow Glen Middle School where we taught all of the 8th grade science classes the fundamentals of Mendelian genetics using flies and classic fly phenotypes (a new part of the SC state curriculum for 8th graders).
4/21/23: Skylar received an honorable mention for her poster at Discover USC on reproductive isolation between laboratory Drosophila populations!
4/1/23: Claudia’s paper that manipulated sexual selection in evolving mosquito populations is out in Current Biology here. We found that removing sexual selection causes rapid genome-wide divergence and identified a chemosensory gene important for male mating success.
1/31/23: Samantha received a SPARC Graduate Research Grant that will allow her to extend her Ph.D. dissertation, congratulations Samantha!
8/4/22: Sakshi has successfully defended her dissertation! Sakshi dealt with a change of institutions and a global pandemic right in the middle of her Ph.D. and nevertheless put together a great dissertation focused on sexual selection and immunity. Congratulations, Dr. Sharda!
7/28/22: We received funding from the National Science Foundation that will support our experimental speciation project for the next several years!
6/26/22: Samantha and Claudia both did a great job presenting parts of their dissertation work at the Evolution 2022 meeting in Cleveland.
5/20/22: Congratulations to Graham, who received the Outstanding Biological Sciences Senior Award for the Department of Biological Sciences at USC!
4/22/22: Graham presented the early results from our reinforcement experimental evolution project at Discover USC, earning 2nd place in the poster competition.
3/27/22: At the SEPEEG meeting in Georgia, Samantha gave a talk about her work on the seminal fluid protein Acp29AB and Graham presented a poster on our experimental reinforcement project.
2/12/22: Sakshi’s paper testing for a role for sexual selection in fly adaptation to Pseudomonas entomophila infection is out here.
11/22/21: Claire successfully defended her Honors college thesis!
9/6/21: We have a new paper out in Evolution today (here) where we used a modeling approach to ask how the softness of selection (the scale at which competition takes place) influences the evolution of sexual dimorphism in different mating systems.
6/21/21: Welcome to Sophia, our new laboratory technician, and Izzy, a senior at the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics who is working on a project in the lab this summer.
5/1/21: The lab was awarded an ASPIRE grant to fund work on our experimental speciation project.
4/13/21: Congratulations to Claire, who received funding from the UofSC Honors College to continue her work in the lab on the condition-dependence of the female postmating responses.
3/2/21: Our paper on the genomics of adaptation to larval malnutrition is out in MBE (here).
1/29/21: A collaboration led by Maria Litovchenko at the EPFL on genetic variation in circadian gene expression patterns across tissues is out in Science Advances (here).
1/4/21: Two new undergraduates, Faith and Isabela, joined the lab this spring semester. Welcome!
12/15/20: Congratulations to Graham, who received a Magellan Scholar award that will fund his research project through the spring semester!
8/20/20: Four new folks in the lab! PhD student Samantha and undergraduates Graham, Claire, and Haven all started this week.
1/17/20: We have a new paper (here) from work led by Michael Frochaux that identifies genetic variation associated with changes in gene expression and susceptibility after flies are orally infected by Pseudomonas entomophila.
12/15/19: Our collaboration on mitochondrial genotypes and phenotypes in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP), led by Roel Bevers and Maria Litovchenko at the EPFL, is out (here).
9/5/19: We are hosting the European Drosophila Research Conference (EDRC 2019) at EPFL in Lausanne as well as a workshop on interactions between the sexes–it has been great to have such a large contingent of evolutionary biologists here at the fly meeting.
6/12/19: Our first paper from a project with Lauren Cator at Imperial College London–experimental evolution in Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito– is out in Proc B (here).
4/8/19: Our new paper on how sexual conflict shapes male manipulation of females is out (here) in PNAS! A collaboration with the groups of Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Lausanne and Claudia Fricke at the University of Muenster.
2/9/18: Congratulations to Michael Beyeler, who successfully defended his Masters thesis on the genetic basis of sexual size dimorphism in the DGRP.
12/13/18: Sakshi passed her qualifying exam and is now a PhD candidate, hooray!
12/15/17: Sakshi Sharda joins the group as a PhD student.
1/19/17: Our paper on the evolution of cognitive aging with Martyna Zwoinska and Alexei Maklakov from Uppsala University is out in Evolution (here).
11/7/16: We have a new paper out on how the manipulation of intralocus sexual conflict has changed development and maturation processes in a sex-specific way in our evolving fly populations (here).
9/1/16: The lab has moved to the EPFL in Lausanne and our Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project on sexually antagonistic selection has officially begun!
9/16/16: Masters students Rohan Ravel and Michael Jardine have successfully defended their Masters theses.
6/8/16: We are hosting folks from throughout the UK and Europe at Imperial College for the Centre for Ecology and Evolution (CEE) summer symposium “War and peace: the dynamics of evolutionary conflict”.