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! 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!