With flying colors, Tadeo Ramirez-Parada passed his PhD Qualifying Exam!  His committee (Susan Mazer, Leander Anderegg, and Elsa Cleland) thank him for making our job so easy!  Congratulations, Tadeo!

Congratulations to PhD student Helen Payne for receiving a fellowship in Ecomedicine from UCSB, to support her proposal to investigate the effects of participating in field courses on student mental health and academic performance!

Spatial uncertainty in herbarium data: simulated displacement but not error distance alters estimates of phenological sensitivity to climate in a widespread California wildflower

Congratulations to Lisa and Devin, both of whom have just been awarded Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Research Awards to explore the process and outcome of natural selection within and among populations of Nemophila menziesii (Baby Blue Eyes: Boraginaceae) in four UC Natural Researves.  The titles of their research projects are:

Lisa Kim: "Does seed size evolve? A quantitative genetic analysis of the heritability of seed mass and selection in a California-native annual "

Check out Kris' investigation of the functional significance of the anther dimorphism exhibited by Clarkia unguiculata, in which she experimentally tested for a long-predicted difference in pollen performance between the vestigial short stamens and the relatively robust long stamens produced by this (and many other) species of Clarkia.

Six undergraduates in the Mazer lab received prestigious awards from UCSB's Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities program to support their independent research during the 2018-2019 academic year.  The titles of their projects are:

Ivana Gomez: The effects of long-term vs. recent climatic conditions on the timing of flowering in Nemophila menziesii using electronic records and physical herbarium specimens

Receiving a 2018 CCS Summer Undergraduate Fellowship enabled Kristen Klitgaard, a third-year CCS Biologist, to dedicate her summer to UC Santa Barbara's Mazer lab. Kristen is one of 36 students who earned 2018 CCS Summer Undergraduate Fellowships. Completely supported by donors, each recipient is currently working in one of UCSB's top labs or creating creative works of art.

Jasen Liu, a fourth-year undergraduate Biologist in the College of Creative Studies (CCS), has been selected as a 2018 Goldwater Scholar. The Goldwater Scholarship Program, one of the oldest and most prominent national scholarships in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics, recognizes students in their second or third year who have the potential to become leaders in research within their field.  He has been working in my lab since his freshman year, and is a co-author on a paper recently published in Evolution (Mazer et al., 2018). Read more about Jasen at:  https://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/news/2018/jasen-liu-third-year-ccs-biologist-named-goldwater-scholar