Lina Arcila Hernandez will be joining us starting May 2019. She will fill the new ALI post-doc position in EEB to study the feasibility and efficacy of implementing social and team-based learning in online teaching platforms. Lina will be teaching in BioEE1781, the online version of Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, and working with Michelle Smith and Kelly Zamudio on her research. We look forward to having her!
Grad students from our lab are participating in GRASSHOPR this year, a Graduate Student School Outreach Program. GRASSHOPR pairs Cornell graduate students with teachers in Tompkins County and Geneva to teach 3- to 5-session mini-courses on topics related to the graduate student’s field or interests. Students at Randall Elementary in Cortland learned all about frog diversity, tadpoles and metamorphosis, and natural history.
More importantly, students got to meet “real frog scientists”!
Congratulations to Cait McDonald! Cait received a MAF Fellowship for her project entitled: Eastern Newt (Notophthalmus viridescens) Immune Responses to the Next Amphibian Threat, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal).
She will be comparing differences in Bsal resistance/susceptibility among newt populations that occupy a latitudinal gradient. Stay tuned for cool results!
Congrats to Anat Belasen, who is finishing up her PhD at University of Michigan and will be joining us in August 2019 as a Smith Post-Doctoral Fellow! Her project, “Leveraging the Past to Preserve the Future: Finding a Litmus Test for Amphibian Disease Susceptibility” will examine genomic changes in frogs impacted by disease, as a means of predicting susceptibility. Anat will be based at Cornell, but also advised by Rob Fleischer at Smithsonian National Zoo Center for Conservation Genomics, and Laura Patterson (state herpetologist) at California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Welcome Anat!
Zamudio Lab 