Author: amandakylegibson

Anna’s featured in UVA Today’s Class of 2021 series – congratulations Anna!

https://news.virginia.edu/content/class-2021-dental-school-bound-grad-combines-love-means-medians-and-molars

To pursue a Masters of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. Way to go Emily!!! Congratulations!

Read about Sophie’s work as a College Science Scholar and the contribution of undergraduates to the lab: https://give.as.virginia.edu/news/story/science%E2%80%99s-secret-society

Congratulations to Anna Nguyen on getting into dental school! Anna has decided to attend UCSF’s School of Dentristy, and she’s excited to start there next fall, after blowing through UVA in just three years. Way to go Anna!

Congratulations to Emma Kirschke for getting into vet school!! She’ll be going to the VA-MD College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech. Go Emma!

Anna Nguyen was awarded an Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Infectious Disease Award from UVA’s Global Infectious Disease Institute for her recently published work on the monoculture effect. Congratulations Anna!!

She and the other awardees will present their research at a symposium in January

We (Mandy and third-year UVA undergraduate Anna Nguyen) just published a study in Evolution Letters! We conducted a series of meta-analyses to test the hypothesis that host populations with reduced genetic diversity experience increased burdens of parasites relative to genetically diverse host populations. The results show that experimental increases in genetic diversity reduce parasitism by 20% in non-crop hosts and by 50% in crop hosts! You can read a blog post all about the article here.

Gibson, A.K. and Nguyen, A.E. (2020), Does genetic diversity protect host populations from parasites? A meta‐analysis across natural and agricultural systems. Evolution Letters. https://doi.org/10.1002/evl3.206

The whole study diagrammed , with our original predictions

It was such fun working on this new paper on social behavior and parasitism with someof my scientific heroes – Dana Hawley, Andrea Townsend, Meggan Craft, and Jessica Stephenson! Thanks to Dana Hawley for assembling this team and giving me some fascinating news ideas to think about.

Read more here: DM Hawley, AK Gibson, AK Townsend, ME Craft, and JF Stephenson. 2020. Bidirectional interactions between host social behaviour and parasites arise through ecological and evolutionary processes. Parasitology. In press. link

Kayla Stoy, a graduate student at Emory University, has recently published a commentary on the evolutionary genetics of mutualism. It was an honor to work with Kayla, Levi Morran, and Nicole Gerardo in developing her insightful ideas!

Find it here: KS Stoy, AK Gibson, NM Gerardo, and LT Morran. A need to consider the evolutionary genetics of host–symbiont mutualisms. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. In press. link

Some of the fun mutualisms that inspired Kayla:

We’re very excited to welcome two new lab members this past week – Sarah Hesse and Juliana Jiranek! They’ll be running some newly funded projects in the lab, and we are just thrilled to have them! Sarah joins us after an undergraduate at Emory where she did research in Levi Morran’s lab, followed by time abroad in Frankfurt, Germany working to support recent migrants to Germany. Juliana joins us after an undergraduate at Princeton in Jess Metcalf’s lab, where she studied the effects of climate on the ecology and epidemiology of plant pathogens. Welcome!

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