Today marks the transition from summer to fall (in terms of the school year, at least) and wow, it’s been a busy summer. Jessica was involved in a variety of projects- working to get papers off her desk and into review, working up in Yosemite with an awesome REU intern, and at the end of summer, traveling to the Unifying Ecology Gordon Research Conference in Maine and then ESA in Sacramento.  She also got to meet UC President Janet Napolitano!  She’s looking forward to teaching a grad level class in Community Ecology this fall and writing lots of grant proposals.

Kaitlin made great progress on the community paleomodeling project.  We’re in the process of writing that paper, and Kaitlin, Diego, and Jessica presented results on that project at various meetings this year.  Kaitlin attended two conferences this summer: AmQua in Seattle and ESA in Sacramento.

Eric has started narrowing in on projects for his PhD. He was primarily in the lab this summer, identifying specimens from a fossil deposit in northern California.  He also gave a talk at ESA in Sacramento and is currently attending the “Modelling species distributions under climate change” short course in Copenhagen.  We are all looking forward to his return so he can teach us what he learned there!

This week, we also welcomed a new PhD student, Danaan DeNeve Weeks, along with other new students in the ES and QSB grad groups.  Plus, we’ll have a new postdoc working on ancient DNA projects starting in December, Sarah Brown.  So there is a lot of good stuff to celebrate in the Paleoecology Lab!