Dr. Scott Villa recently joined the laboratory as an IRACDA FIRST program postdoctoral fellow. Scott received his PhD from the University of Utah, where he conducted a series of elegant experiments to study the impacts of lice adaptation to alternative pigeon hosts. This work was with Dale Clayton.

Scott will be developing the squash bug – Burkholderia system as a model to explore the impacts of symbiosis on sexual selection, hybridization, and reproductive isolation.

Quimi Vidaurre Montoya is a graduate from the laboratory of Andre Rodrigues. He is a mycologist studying the diversity, evolution and taxonomy of Escovopsis, a fungal parasite associated with the gardens of fungus-growing ants. We are excited to bring his expertise and love for fungi into the lab.

The Gerardo and de Roode labs recently completed the S8 challenge–Sandra’s Seriously Spectacular Series of Scholarly Scientific Studies in September–where each person reads a paper a day everyday in the month of September. We challenged the Corbett lab to compete with us, but some might say the intra-lab competition was more intense. Our average was 24 papers read per person over the month. Fittingly, as the namesake of the challenge, Sandra was the first in the lab to finish the reading challenge (we could read up to 3 papers a day). Above, she poses with the winner’s trophy next to our poster that tracks each person’s progress with stickers! The trophy is made from an ancient lab relic and filled with paper flowers. All in all, we all had a great experience participating in the challenge–it got us to read papers we would normally put off reading, we learned about cool science, and we got stickers for each day we read, which is to say, the best motivator of all.