Mt Shasta

News

 

  • Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology and a Center for Population Biology faculty member at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded the prestigious National Academy of Science Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences for 2024. Ross-Ibarra was awarded the prize in recognition of his “pioneering studies on the evolutionary genetics of maize, a key crop species for global food production.”

  • A Mixed Origin Made Maize Successful:  Maize (corn) is one of the world's most important staple crops and has great cultural significance for Indigenous peoples in the Americas. New work by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, a Center for Population Biology graduate group faculty member at UC Davis, and international colleagues shows how maize was domesticated from two wild varieties.

  • Renowned Marine Ecologist Jay Stachowicz Wins Teaching Prize:  Jay Stachowicz, a professor of evolution and ecology and a Center for Population Biology faculty member who studies the biodiversity and resilience of coastal ecosystems, has been named the 37th recipient of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The prize, which recognizes exceptional teaching and scholarship, is among the largest of its kind in the country.

  • Beds of eelgrass (Zostera marina) form an important habitat in coastal regions throughout the northern hemisphere, crucial to many fish and other species and storing vast amounts of carbon. A new study published July 20 in Nature Plants shows that eelgrass spread around the world much more recently than previously thought, just under a quarter-million years ago. The results have implications for how eelgrass could be affected by a changing climate.  An international team, including Professors Jay Stachowicz and Jonathan Eisen at the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and UC Davis Genome Center, reconstructed the history of eelgrass based on DNA sequences of the plant from around the world. The project was coordinated by Thorsten Reusch, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany.
  • Peter Wainwright, a Distinguished Professor, Center for Population Biology faculty member, and Chair of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, has been honored with the 2023 Joseph S. Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in Ichthyology. Conferred by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH), the award recognizes exceptional contributions to the realm of fish biology and aquatic ecosystems.

 

  • In the College of Biological Sciences, principles of diversity, equity and inclusion are guiding principles. As such, an array of special DEI-related programs led by graduate students, including Danielle De La Pascua, and Jeffrey Groh from the Population Biology Graduate group and the Center for Population Biology, each of whom was awarded a Graduate DEIJ Leader Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year, culminated in an open house event highlighting their achievements from 1:00-3:00pm on June 8, in Walker Hall.  Read the full story here.

 

  • Elena Suglia, a soon-to-graduate Ph.D. candidate in the Population Biology Graduate Group and a Center for Population Biology graduate student affiliate, has spent her time at Davis tackling the “inextricably intertwined issues” of environmental protection, environmental justice, and equity.

    In recognition of her leadership in working at the intersection of science and public policy, Suglia was awarded the 2023 Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

  • Biocrust mapping project wins Creativity-Innovation Award...  Xiaoli Dong, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and a Center for Popoulation Biology faculty member, is putting biological soil crust on the climate change research map, a project for which she received UC Davis’ single Early Career Faculty Award for Creativity and Innovation for 2023.

 

  • Rachael Bay, an assistant professor of evolution and ecology, and a Center for Population Biology faculty member, is the latest guest on ‘Face to Face With Chancellor May.’  Rachael studies how human-caused changes to marine systems impact evolutionary trajectories, including whether certain species might survive in the future. Her conversation with Chancellor Gary S. May, posted on April 25, 2023, as a video and as a podcast, touched on her research and how she got interested in the ocean despite growing up in Montana.

 

  • Do Relatives Make Good Neighbors?... This scientific topic will be discussed by CPB faculty member, Sharon Strauss, at a spring 2023 Emeriti Lecture.  "Awed by biodiversity," Strauss, a Distinguished Professor of evolution and ecology, presented this topic at a 2019 colloquium at the Institute for Advanced Study at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.  In promotion of the event, Strauss wrote that the characteristics of species and how they interact with one another are shaped by both historical factors of past evolution as well as contemporary interactions among species.

 

  • Aquarium of the Pacific - African American Scholar Program 2023 Recipients:  For the third year in a row, a cohort of exceptional African American students were awarded scholarship funds and join a growing community of scholars engaging in various Aquarium efforts.  Award recipients were selected in part by a committee including Aquarium staff members and members of the community.  Congratulations to Khalil Russell, CPB graduate student affiliate, who was named an award recipient!

 

  • Three UC Davis faculty members are among 125 recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships, prestigious awards given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scientific researchers seen as emerging leaders in their fields.

    The 2023 fellows, including UC Davis’ Kate L. Laskowski - a CPB faculty member, Jesús M. Velázquez and Alexander S. Wein, “represent the most promising scientific researchers working today,” the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation said in announcing its selections Feb. 15.

  • Early this year, graduate students in the Scientific Filmmaking course (ECL 290/PBG 298) shared their short films at the Ecology Film Festival, which was held at both the Bodega Bay Grange Hall and at the Veterans Memorial Theatre in Davis. The course was co-taught by Professor Eric Sanford and professional filmmaker Grant Thompson.  The course and film festivals were organized by PhD student Emily Longman, with generous support from a Bilinksi Foundation fellowship.

    The subjects of each film range from studying the impacts of global change on trees and ponds in the Sierra Nevada, to uncovering the mysteries of beetles and snails on the California coast. Together, the films highlight the breadth of research conducted by UC Davis graduate students, as well as their impressive creativity and communication skills.  Updated information and a link to the films is available here!

  • Science Storytelling Through a Camera Lens...  From Chilean tidepools to the High Sierra, 12 UC Davis graduate students traveled the world this summer in search of answers to ecology’s most pressing questions. The Ecology Film Festival, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, at Bodega Bay; and Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, in Davis showcased graduate students who took part in UC Davis’ Scientific Filmmaking course this past fall. Read about the Ecology Film Festival and the associated UC Davis Scientific Filmmaking course here!

  • Corals Saving Corals...  Under the right living arrangement, disease-resistant corals can help “rescue” corals that are more vulnerable to disease, found a study from the University of California, Davis, that monitored a disease outbreak at a coral nursery in Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. 

    The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that when people grow corals of the same genotype — or genetic makeup — together, those corals are more vulnerable to disease than corals that grow among a mixture of genotypes. The study further found that some vulnerable corals can be “rescued” by resistant genotypes.

    “We saw that some corals were more resistant to disease just by being around other corals that were particularly resistant,” said lead author Anya Brown, an assistant professor at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and a Center for Population Biology faculty member. “Proximity to these resistant genotypes helped buffer the susceptible corals from the effects of the disease.”

  • Hibernating Corals and the Microbiomes That Sustain Them - As winter approaches, many species of animals — from bears and squirrels to parasitic wasps and a few lucky humans — hunker down for some needed rest. The northern star coral (Astrangia poculata) also enters a hibernating state of dormancy, or quiescence, during this time. But what happens to its microbiome while it’s sleeping?

    A study led by University of California, Davis, Center for Population Biology/Population Biology Assistant Professor Anya Brown found that microbial communities shift while this coral enters dormancy, providing it an important seasonal reset. The work may carry implications for coral in warmer waters struggling with climate change and other environmental issues.

  • Center for Population Biology faculty member, Rachael Bay, was selected by Popular Science as one of "The Brilliant 10: The top up-and-coming minds in science".  There’s a phrase that rings loudly in the heads of Popular Science editors any time they bring together a new Brilliant 10 class: “They’ve only just begun.” Their annual list of early-career scientists and engineers is as much a celebration of what those honorees have already accomplished as it is a forecast for what they’ll do next. To find the brightest innovators of today, Popular Science embarked on a nationwide search, vetting hundreds of researchers across a range of institutions and disciplines.  Popular Science indicates that the collective work of this year’s class sets the stage for a healthier, safer, more efficient, and more equitable future—one that’s already taking shape today. 

 

  • Deep evolution casts a longer shadow than previously thought, scientists report in a new paper published Aug. 1, 2022, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Smithsonian scientists and colleagues looked at eelgrass communities—the foundation of many coastal marine food webs along the north Atlantic and Pacific coasts—and discovered their ancient genetic history can play a stronger role than the present-day environment in determining their size, structure and who lives in them. And this could have implications for how well eelgrasses adapt to threats like climate change.  Jay Stachowicz, professor, Department of Evolution and Ecology, and Center for Population, is a co-author on this paper.

  • Coral reefs are home to a spectacular variety of fish. A new study by biologists at the University of California, Davis, shows that much of this diversity is driven by a relatively recent innovation among bony fish — feeding by biting prey from surfaces. The work was published the week of July 26, 2022 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    “There may have been some biting done by teleosts before the end-Cretaceous, but our reconstructions suggest that it was very uncommon,” said Katherine Corn, graduate student in the UC Davis Population Biology graduate group, Department of Evolution and Ecology, and Center for Population Biology, and lead author on the paper.

    Corn, working with Professor Peter Wainwright and other colleagues in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, classified 1,530 living species of reef fish by feeding method, then mapped them onto an evolutionary tree of the teleosts. They also studied the rate of body shape evolution in all of these fish.

  • Congratulations to Sebastian Schreiber, CPB Faculty member!  The UC Davis Academic Senate and the Academic Federation recently announced their annual awards given to members for exceptional research, teaching and mentoring, and public service - Sebastian Schreiber, professor, Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences, CPB and PBG faculty member, was recognized.

  • Congratulations to Michael Turelli, CPB faculty member, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, CPB faculty member, and Anurag Agrawal, Population Biology Graduate Group alum, on their elections to the National Academic of Sciences, April 2021. 

  • Since the 1950s, “Africanized” honeybees have spread north and south across the Americas until apparently coming to a halt in California and northern Argentina. Now genome sequencing of hundreds of bees from the northern and southern limits shows a gradual decline in African ancestry across hundreds of miles, rather than an abrupt shift.

    “There’s a gradual transition at the same latitude in North and South America,” said Erin Calfee, Population Biology graduate student and affiliate member of CPB at the University of California, Davis, and first author on the paper, published Oct. 19, 2020, in PLOS Genetics. “There’s a natural barrier that is likely maintained by many different genetic loci.”

  • Jay Rosenheim is now a newly elected Fellow of the Entomological Society of America (ESA).  Each year only 10 are selected for the honor.  Rosenheim, who joined the UC Davis entomology faculty in 1990, is internationally known for his research on the ecology of insect parasitoids and predators, insect reproductive behavior, and the application of big data, or "ecoinformatics," methods in agricultural entomology.  Read the detailed article here.

  • Cassandra Ettinger, CPB graduate student affiliate member, submitted a paper titled, Characterization of the mycobiome of the seagrass, Zostera marina, reveals putative associations with marine chytrids.

  • Didem Sarikaya, a University of California's President's Postdoctoral Fellowship recipient, has appointments in the labs of Professor David Begun, CPB faculty member, and Assistant Professor John Albeck, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.  In a study appearing in Current Biology, Didem Sarikaya and her colleagues analyzed egg-laying strategies of 65 different Hawaiian Drosophila species and found that egg-laying capacities diverged in response to their unique environments, which directly affected the number of cells involved in each species’ ovarian development.

  • In the lab of Richard Grosberg, Population Biology PhD student and CPB affiliate Victoria Morgan, studies the genetics of land crabs to understand how they adapted to living on land.  In the summer of 2017, Morgan traveled to Christmas Island on a fieldwork expedition.  She was fascinated by the breadth of the island's land crab species.

  • David Neale, CPB Faculty member, helped sequence the coast redwood and giant sequoia genomes.  The research partners, composed of the University of California Davis, Johns Hopkins and the Save the Redwoods League, are making the data publicly available.

  • Vince Buffalo, CPB affiliate, graduated from UC Davis with a B.A. in Economics and Political Science.  Today, he studies evolutionary and population genetics in the lab of Professor Graham Coop.  Find out how he traded macroeconomic models for genome sequencing.

  • CPB faculty member Alan Hastings received a RAISE award, for Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering, a category for projects that appear to promise transformational advances.

  • Bacteria of the Flies: Tracing the Spread of Disease-Controlling Wolbachia...  In a study appearing in Current Biology, Michael Turelli, distinguished professor of genetics in the Department of Evolution and Ecology / CPB faculty member, and his colleagues traced the spread of closely related Wolbachia across Drosophila fly species. They found that while the flies evolutionarily diverged tens of millions of years ago, their Wolbachia bacteria diverged only tens of thousands of years ago.

  • In a study appearing in Genome Biology and Evolution, Associate Professor Santiago Ramirez, Department of Evolution and Ecology / CPB faculty member, and postdoctoral researcher Julie Cridland provide a genetic snapshot of the state’s honey bee populations, defining how the species has changed over the past 105 years. Their findings could help researchers breed hardier honey bees capable of thriving under many environmental stressors.

  • CPB faculty member David Neale’s research is highlighted in this Washington Post ‘Decoding the Redwoods’ article which discusses that as threats to California’s giant redwoods grow, the key to their salvation might be in their complex genetic code.

  • A big congratulations was in order for Professor Gail Patricelli, Department of Evolution and Ecology and CPB faculty member, who received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the UC Davis Academic Senate and Academic Federation in 2018.  Patricelli was selected based on the dedication, enthusiasm and creativity she showcases inside and outside undergraduate classrooms.

  • UC Davis integrative genetics and genomics Ph.D. student and CPB affiliate member Cassie Ettinger identifies and characterizes seagrass-associated microbial communities. A study published last year in the journal PeerJ suggests how understanding the role of these microbes could reveal new information about seagrass sulfur cycling and establish seagrass as a model organism.

  • Moria Robinson receives a 2016-17 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. This award, which is sponsored by Graduate Studies, recognizes excellence in teaching by graduate students on the UC Davis campus.
  • Congratulations to CPB faculty member Annie Schmitt, who has been elected an Honorary Lifetime Member of the American Society of Naturalists
  • CPB faculty member Tim Caro has discovered why giant pandas are black and white.  More news here and here.
  • CPB faculty member Peter Wainwright has won the annual UC Davis Faculty Research Lecture award.  Peter joins previous CPB recipients of this prize - Chuck Langley, Michael Turelli, and Don Strong – and that’s just in the last few years.
  •  CPB members and alums Will Wetzel, Moria Robinson, Heather Kharouba, and Rick Karban have published a paper in Nature showing that plants suppress herbivore populations through variable nutrient levels.
  •  Eric Sanford and his colleagues investigate how sea urchins cope with ocean acidification.
  •  A former CPB graduate student affiliate, Matt Meisner, is the co-founder and head of analytics at Farmers Business Network.   Matt’s company currently has over 4,000 member farmers, and has been analyzing data on 13 million acres of crops they own.  More news about this innovative company and the many ways it is empowering farmers here.  Matt received his PhD in the labs of CPB faculty members Jay Rosenheim and Sebastian Schreiber.