November 12, 2019

"Meet the scientist who's been counting California butterflies for 47 years and has no plans to stop," reads the headline for a profile article about Distinguished Professor Art Shapiro, of the Department of Evolution and Ecology and the Center for Population Biology. The piece was published today in the Los Angeles Times.   

October 28, 2019

Professors Jonathan Eisen and Veronica Martínez-Cerdeño were awarded the 2019 ADVANCE Scholar Award for their work to improve gender equity in STEM through their teaching, research and service in addition to encouraging research, leadership, and outreach to underserved communities and/or mentorship of underrepresented students.

November 05, 2019

Posted by Tanya Perez

Perhaps the best way to sum up Professor Jonathan Eisen’s philosophy is to note his belief that “It is important to fix that which is easily fixable.” 

Eisen, who has appointments in the Genome Center, the department of evolution and ecology, and the department of medical microbiology and immunology, “uses his powers of national influence for good,” according to his Aggie Hero nominator. 

Doctoral candidate Philipp Brand, Population Biology Graduate Group, and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, had just finished compiling the genome, or complete set of genetic material of the firebrat — a tiny wingless, nocturnal insect found throughout much of the world — when something surprised him.  

The snipefish, an ocean-dwelling relative of the seahorse, has a very long, skinny snout ending in a tiny mouth. A recent study by UC Davis graduate student Sarah Longo shows that snipefish feed with an elastic-boosted head flick at almost unprecedented speed.

“At as little as two milliseconds, it’s among the fastest feeding events ever recorded for fish,” said Longo, now a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University.

About 375 million years ago, the state of Iowa lay submerged beneath an ocean. Marine creatures skittered, crawled and swam through these waters.

University of California, Davis, Professor Tim Caro and Martin How of the University of Bristol led a series of new experiments to better understand how stripes manipulate the behavior of biting flies as they attempt to come in to land on zebras.  Read the details her

Vince Buffalo, a UC Davis Population Biology Graduate Group student, studies evolutionary and population genetics in the lab of Professor Graham Coop, where he’s developing statistical methods that use population genomic data to detect when populations are rapidly adapting to new environments, which many organisms are currently doing as they face climate change. 

For the past three summers, Peter Wainwright, his graduate students and a select number of undergraduates have journeyed to the National Museum of Natural History’s Museum Support Center, located just outside of Washington D.C., to collect data from preserved specimens in the National

Assistant Professor Rachael Bay, Department of Evolution and Ecology and a Population Biology faculty member, learned to scuba dive far from the tropical environments conducive to coral reefs.