Just before the winter break, a flurry of publications! (ok, two, but that’s better than none!)

After a long journey through the review process, I am so happy that this paper is finally published. It was led by Clarke Knight, who started the project as a Masters student with Ben Blonder and patiently and brilliantly led the paper through many iterations of review.  Clarke is now a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

And UC Merced graduate student Nate Fox spearheaded this paper on lagomorph identification. This paper was the result of despairing over how to identify the rabbits at La Brea for our #labreawebs project, and doing some careful work to come up with a workable protocol for identifying the species there. Great job, Nate!

We’ve had lots of other good news in the lab over the year – new babies, papers submitted, qualifying exams passed, labwork triumphs, etc. Perhaps our New Year’s resolution should be to more consistently post about all the good things happening in the lab and at UC Merced!

A few months ago, I was notified that I got an NSF CAREER award!  I’ve been sitting on the news for a while, while the details got worked out.  But here’s the official announcement from UC Merced and the link to the award within the NSF Earth Sciences Division.  Many thanks to NSF’s Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology group for supporting my work!!

And this also means that I’ll be looking for a grad student to work with on this for next fall! So for prospective grad students, please look through the various announcements, my webpage and papers, etc., and contact me if you have exciting ideas you want to work on that relate to this project!

It’s been an exciting time in the Blois lab recently!
* Jessica found out she was awarded tenure, which will become effective July 1st.
* Eric recently had his first paper from his dissertation work accepted, forthcoming in the Journal of Biogeography. This paper explores the past potential range shifts among North American mammals, and whether they are associated with climate velocity or dispersal ability.
* Robert submitted his first paper from the lab, on examining the challenges of niche modeling when we potentially have too many occurrences rather than too few.
* We will be joined in September by new postdoc Mairin Balisi! Mairin is finishing her PhD at UCLA and recently got an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology to work with Jessica and Emily Lindsey at the La Brea Tar Pits (primarily supervised by Emily). Many congrats to Mairin! More on her work coming soon.