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! 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…
Kara passed her qualifying exam and presented her proposal defense this week! Congratulations and great job Kara!
Joanna recently visited a local elementary school to talk to students about bear biology. The students even had the opportunity to get up close and personal with real examples of bear fur and bones!
Tina presented a poster at the 2024 XXIII Bay Area Population Genetics Conference (BAPG) in Berkeley titled “DNA Methylation Underlies Responses to Heat Stress in the California Mussel.” Congratulations Tina!
Joanna was recently interviewed live at KTVU about her recent NSF award to study bear DNA! Check out the interview here! Mike Peña wrote the a UCSC News article on this project, which you can find here. Nice job Joanna!
The lab attended the Annual Meeting of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico this July. Joanna, Sam, and Tina presented research, and Ellie co-organized a symposium on sex chromosomes. Check out some photos from the conference!
Tina was accepted to attend the NSF-Sponsored workshop “Detecting adaptive evolutionary events in genomes of polar species” at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, St. Augustine, Florida. This workshop will cover methods for analyzing positive selection in diverse organisms and provide opportunities to network with other polar biologists. Congratulations Tina!