News

Mandy was awarded the Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award, which goes to an assistant professor at UVA who has demonstrated outstanding teaching and a commitment to student success. Big thanks to students and colleagues who supported her nomination! See the UVAToday feature here

They’re off to exciting things this summer! Leila will join the Beck Lab at the Jackson Laboratory as part of their REU program. Tori has been accepted to the Mountain Lake Biological Station REU program and will work with Corlett Wood. And Ally Motter is graduating and starting as an NIH IRTA in the Hanchard Lab at the National Human Genome Research Institute

Caroline and Mandy have a review coming out soon in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics entitled “Ecology and Evolution of Parasite Avoidance.” Thanks to editor Judie Bronstein for the invitation to submit and guidance in developing the manuscript.

The lab has a new paper coming out in Evolution entitled “Contrasting parasite-mediated reductions in fitness within vs. between patches of a nematode host.” It represents work by Anne Janisch, undergraduate Emily Tillet, and Louis Bubrig to figure out the fitness consequences of the natural parasites of C. elegans. We’ll post the manuscript soon!

Louis passed his qualifying exams with flying colors!!! He was appropriately celebrated with cookies, champagne and a silly hat, photos of which will not be posted here…for now…

This semester we’re very fortunate to welcome three new undergraduates to the lab! Welcome Andreas Kamali, Adianna Lockwood-Shabat, and Talia Sol!

Huge congratulations to postdoc Fabiane Mundim – she’ll be starting as an Assistant Professor of Insect Ecology at Utah State University in August 2022!!!!! Keep an eye out for positions in her new lab next fall! We look forward to working with the whole Mundim lab in the future.

Caroline Amoroso was awarded an NRSA F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship from NIH! She’s already started on her super cool plan to work with the Gibson and Antonovics labs to study the evolution of parasite avoidance using both theoretical and empirical approaches with C. elegans. Congratulations Caroline – we’re all thrilled to get the chance to work with you on this!

Akosua officially completed her undergraduate degree this semester. Congratulations! She’ll spend the next semester prepping for medical school and working at the UVA hospital. We’ll miss having you around, but look forward to hearing about your upcoming adventures!

We’d forgotten that the lab existed prior to the arrival of technician superstars Sarah and Juliana, but apparently it’d only been a year. Thanks for supporting science and smiles you two!