Congratulations to Courtenay Ray, who just passed her qualifying exam yesterday. She is now the lab’s first PhD candidate, and hopefully the first and only lab member to endure a 100% remote examination process. The committee included Carl Boettiger, Albert Ruhi, Roberto Salguero-Gómez, and David Ackerly. (screenshot credit Rob)

Congratulations to Ivanna Caspeta, whose poster presentation on vacant niches at a recent WAESO conference won a first place award! Ivanna also more recently presented her work at ASU’s SOLUR symposium, which was held virtually via Zoom – where she also gave a great presentation. Thanks to lab postdoc Pierre for leading mentoring for this…

It is the end of an era… but both of the lab’s first two postdocs have now wrapped up their contracts and are on their way to their next jobs. I will miss the energy and community spirit they each brought to the lab, and look forward to return visits and future collaborations. In the…

Global plant trait relationships hold even at the cold extremes of plant life on Earth. Check out our new paper led by Haydn Thomas from Team Shrub with over 100 coauthors from the Tundra Trait Team, and led by Dr. Anne Bjorkman and Dr. Isla Myers-Smith. The main finding is that plant life in some…