This afternoon we congratulated Minja Gosto on her new job with Thermo Fisher. Minja worked in the Lakkis and Nicotra labs for five years (almost to the day) providing attentive care to the Hydractinia, performing experiments, and generally boosting morale. She will be missed, and we wish her all the best in her new job.

Dr. Uma Karadge has completed a very successful postdoctoral fellowship and is now moving to Boston to pursue the next step of her career. She's been the central figure in our work to identify the extracellular ligands of Alr1 and Alr2. We wish her all the very best as she gets to know her new city, new home, and (soon) new family member!

For a few months, now, our lab has been participating in a monthly joint-lab meeting (of sorts) with other labs at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon who are interested in molecular evolution. Now the good folks in the Clark Lab have created a website for our group!

http://www.csb.pitt.edu/faculty/clark/meld/index.html

They even made this cool logo:

Nice work guys!

Steven Sanders, PhD has joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Steve got his PhD at the University of Kansas, where he worked with Paulyn Cartwright to study the evolutionary developmental biology of morphological polymorphism in hydroids. Here at Pitt, he will be working to characterize the expression and function of the Hydractinia allorecognition genes.

Welcome Steve!