News

Tayler Chicoine has always been passionate about improving the state of our agricultural system. In fall 2016 Tayler began her graduate research in the lab of Sarah Evans at MSU's W.K. Kellogg Biological Station. Tayler is exploring plant-microbial interactions and hoping to better understand how, through selecting for beneficial plant-microbial systems, we can naturally improve agricultural systems. To support her research interests, Tayler Chicoine has been awarded the C.S. Mott Predoctoral Fellowship in Sustainable Agriculture.

Mariah Meek, a new faculty member, has published new research in the journal, Ecology and Evolution. In this study, Mariah and her collaborators demonstrated the usefulness of genomic resources for identifying genetic markers that allow fast and accurate identification of the imperiled Chinook salmon in the Great Central Valley of California.

We are pleased to announce that Mariah Meek has joined our department as a new faculty member! Meek is a geneticist, fisheries ecologist, and conservation biologist. She is particularly interested in the evolutionary and ecological processes that generate and maintain diversity within and among populations.

Recently the IBIO Communications Manager, Katie Licht, was elected to an international board member position at the 2016 Association of Zoo and Aquarium Docents and Volunteers Conference in El Paso, Texas.

New IBIO faculty member, Gideon Bradburd, has teamed up with David Lowry in Plant Biology (PLB) and other colleagues from across the country to develop a major analysis and synthesis of the state of the art in efforts to use modern genomic methods to understand the evolution of adaptations. The paper is in the October issue of the American Naturalist.

We are pleased to announce the formation of a new study abroad program in Conservation Medicine (Spring semesters every year)!

Nicole’s curiosity about the natural world began at an early age. She spent countless days of her youth turning over logs in search of salamanders, stirring up river beds to catch crayfish, and fishing with her father in western Michigan. According to Nicole, “Such a fascination with the natural world came from being raised in a family that celebrated every neat creature I captured. At a young age, I recognized the beauty and intrinsic value of earth and its inhabitants.” Despite her early interests, Nicole never planned to study Zoology in college. 

As an undergraduate, Michael Kuczynski discovered his passion for research, specifically the field of behavior ecology. He joined the lab of Tom Getty as a doctoral student to study individual variation in sexual signaling and sexual selection in gray treefrogs. Michael discovered a second passion during his time at MSU - teaching. Consequently, he accepted a position as a non-tenure track assistant professor at Truman State University where his primary responsibilities include teaching introductory biology lectures and labs.

2016 was an outstanding year for Rohan Maddamsetti: he earned his doctorate in Zoology from Michigan State University, he was the first author on a paper that earned accolades for being one of the top three articles published in the journal Genetics in 2015, and this fall he will start a postdoc at the Harvard Medical School.

Congratulations to all the 2016 award winners: Steve Roels, Lily Johnson-Ulrich, Nikki Cavalieri, Kaycee Morra, Eli Strauss, Sean Williams, Taylor Schoen, Nicole Thompson, Casey Geisland, Meghan Bugaj, Ryan Grady, Michael Killewald, Matthew Welc, Lindsey Whitlock, and Ana Wodek.

Emily Weigel, a previous member of the Boughman Lab, graduated from our doctoral program in fall 2015. She has joined Spelman College as a National Science Foundation Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Postdoctoral Fellow.

Sarah Fitzpatrick, a postdoc at MSU's W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, and researchers from Colorado State University have documented genetic rescue in guppies, which was published in Evolutionary Applications. These findings suggest that this species could also provide a model system for informing effective conservation and management of imperiled populations.