In September 2025 Valeria Ramírez Castañeda finished up her PhD and moved on to a King Center postdoc in Sustainability at Stanford University. She will be studying the impact of architecture on biodiversity and disease in the Colombian Amazon town of Leticia.
First up, some awards:
Majo has been awarded the Philomathia Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Sciences! This is a prestigious fellowship for UC Berkeley graduate students, "Students are nominated to receive the award on the basis of their high level of academic distinction and exceptional promise." https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/philomathiacenter/graduate-student-fellowship-environmental-sciences
Becca was elected as a councilor for the Society of Systematic Biologists. Her term starts in January 2025.
Conference updates
Becca, Kannon, and Natalie attended SSAR 2024. Kannon gave a fabulous rendition of his Turnin’ the frickin’ frogs gay talk. Natalie presented a poster on her senior research project. Becca presented on a paper currently in review about passive accumulation of alkaloids in non-toxic poison frogs.
Becca, Kannon, Valeria, and Majo are heading to WCH 10 in Malaysia in 2 weeks.
Personnel updates
Sophie Draper started as our new lab technician. Sophie just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota. She has experience with snail husbandry, fieldwork in Africa, people / project management, and research in genomics.
Nuzha Baksh said goodbye as she heads to Athens, Georgia to start a PhD.
We got two pet frogs for the lab (Dendrobates tinctorius). They were named Denny’s and IHOP after some disagreements about restaurant preferences arising from Kannon’s after-fieldwork dinners.
Adri Jeckel started in July as a new postdoc. She will be working on the toxic flies and poison frog projects.
Fieldwork
Becca went to Ecuador in May to gather samples for the NSF project on color in poison frogs, in collaboration with Santiago Ron. The field season was productive but the samples are still in Ecuador because airlines refuse to carry on the dry shipper. She also visited collaborators at USFQ including Juan Manuel Guaysamín who will be working this fall with Majo trying to cultivate tetrodotoxin-producing bacteria from Atelopus.
Majo traveled to Colombia for her final field season of the PhD to collect samples of a few species of Harlequin toads that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Working with Beto Rueda and his team she was able to obtain even more samples and species that she had hoped for.
We had three stellar undergraduates finish their degrees this May: Ines Huret, Vashee Shenthan, and Natalie Meyer. Ines and Natalie both completed theses and Ines won an award in Natural History from the IB department. Peter Zhiyang Chen also walked this semester, although he will finish in Fall 2024. He was awarded the Franklin Henry Award, which celebrates achievement in physiology, cognition, and biodynamics. Ines will start a two-year lab technician position in the Pellman Lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in June 2024. Natalie will be a research assistant at the Stoller Lab at UCSF during summer 2024, and then a research assistant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus starting fall 2024. Vashee is planning to pursue a degree in medicine and is currently (May 2024) waiting to hear which medical school he will attend. Peter is taking a few more classes this fall while he applies to graduate school and looks for lab technician jobs for 2025.
Ines Huret
Natalie Meyer
Vashee Shenthan
Peter Zhiyang Chen
We also have bittersweet news that Nikki Lemus, who has been working as a part-time technician in the lab since 2021, will be moving on to greener pastures. To be specific, they were awarded an NSF GRFP and will start graduate school at the University of Kansas in fall 2024! Go Nikki!
Nikki Lemus
We have additional team changes at the end of the year. Tyler Douglas filed his dissertation mid December and is now officially Dr. Douglas. Inga Conti-Jerpe finished her tenure as NSF PRFB and is moving to Hong Kong to join Lingnan University as a tenure-track faculty. Congratulations Tyler and Inga!