Tina was recently awarded an Academic Excellence (ACE) Teaching Fellowship! This competitive fellowship provides early-career PhD students with training and hands-on experience using evidence-based, inclusive teaching practices in the classroom. Congratulations Tina!
Owen was featured in a UCSC News article highlighting exemplary students from the class of 2025! Congratulations Owen!
Check out the article here: Celebrating the Class of 2025: Innovators, advocates, and future leaders
Joanna’s parents, Al and Carole Kelley, were recently featured in a UC Santa Cruz Magazine article celebrating the university’s 60th anniversary!
Check out the article here: UCSC at 60: A legacy of Slugs
Emma was recently awarded the Institute of Marine Science’s Student Research and Education Award! Emma received this award for her project “Uncovering the Secrets of the Deep: Genome Assembly for the Hubbs’ Beaked Whale.” Congratulations Emma!
Marcela recently presented a poster on antifreeze proteins in Zoarcoidei fish at the Cultivamos Excelencia Research Scholars Symposium! Congratulations Marcela!
Owen Moosman was awarded the prestigious 2025 Dean’s Award in recognition of his undergraduate research on long read assembly errors and their impact on inferences of copy number variation! Congratulations Owen!
While our feed is usually about lab accomplishments, we are deeply saddened to share the sudden and unexpected passing of Postdoctoral Researcher Carlos Garita-Alvarado. Carlos was a postdoctoral researcher in our lab and Eric Palkovacs’s lab. He joined us in January 2025 and brought to the labs his love of fish biology. He was interested in fish evolution and aquatic ecology, especially the selective pressures underlying morphological and behavioral diversification in freshwater fish.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/03/in-memoriam-garita-alvarado.html
Itzel recently attended the 2025 NIH NHGRI Research Training and Career Development Meeting in Philadelphia and presented her research on the population genomics of hibernation-relevant metabolism genes in brown bears. Congratulations and great job Itzel!
Members of the Kelley Lab attended the Plant and Animal Genomes 32 conference in San Diego last week. In total, the lab presented five posters and four talks!
(Kelley Lab members and alumni in bold, presenting author underlined)
Ryan, K., De-Kayne, R., Arias-Rodriguez, L., Tobler, M., Kelley, J.L. (2025) Movement of Adaptive Alleles Among Locally Adapted Fish Populations. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA.
Bogan, S.N., Moosman, O.W., Yee, M.C., Kline, I., Place, S.P., Kelley, J.L. (2025) Determining Causes and Consequences of Copy Number Evolution in Antifreeze Protein Genes of Polar Fishes Using Long-read Sequencing. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA
Kelley, J.L., Ryan, K., Tobler, M. (2025) Parallel Adaptation in Sympatric Extremophile Fishes. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA
Perry, B.W., Duttke, S., Jansen, H.T., Robbins, C.T., Kelley, J.L. (2025) Regulatory evolution and physiological adaptation: insight from hibernation in bears. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA.
(Kelley Lab members and alumni in bold, presenting author underlined)
Ryan, K., De-Kayne, R., Arias-Rodriguez, L., Tobler, M., Kelley, J.L. (2025) Adapting to Toxicity: Identifying the Source of Adaptive Variation in the Repeated Evolution of Hydrogen Sulfide Tolerance in Live-Bearing Fishes [Poster Presentation]. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA
Jeremias-Lin, A., Ryan, K., Arias-Rodriguez, L., Tobler, M., Kelley, J.L. (2025) Utilizing Genomic Approaches to Understand the Evolution and Demography of Sulfide-Adapted Gambusia and to Further Conservation Efforts for the Species [Poster Presentation]. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA
Salih, D., Armstrong, E.E., Kelley, J.L. (2025). Linking historical brown bear (Ursus arctos) micro satellite data with current whole-genome sequencing data using STR-detection tools. [Poster Presentation]. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA.
Cai, Q., S.N. Bogan, W. Dowd*, J.L. Kelley* (2025) DNA methylation underlies responses to heat stress in the California mussel. [Poster Presentation]. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA.
Moosman, O.W., Kelley, J.L., Bogan, S.N. (2025) Validating Gene Copy Number Variation in Haplotypes of Phased Genome Assemblies: A Study of Antifreeze Protein Genes in Marine Fishes [Poster Presentation]. Plant and Animal Genomes 2025. San Diego, CA
Kara passed her qualifying exam and presented her proposal defense this week! Congratulations and great job Kara!