Bianca Brown was featured as one of seven "exceptional alumni" profiled by the Brown Alumni Magazine in 2021. As quoted below, the article "Emerging Victorious" features seven of the many exemplary students who thrived and graduated despite the pandemic. It's a very fitting and well deserved highlight for Bianca, who we are incredibly proud to have had as the first PhD to fledge from the lab. Congratulations, Bianca, we can't wait to see all the good you do in your life and career!

Congratulations to Courtney Reed on winning the 2021 American Society of Mammalogist's James L. Patton Award. This prestigious award was presented today at the annual ASM conference, which was held online today. The support will enable Courtney to pursue exciting research on how gerbils evolved to be shaped in the diverse way that they are -- can't wait to see what she discovers!

Congratulations to Bianca for completing all requirements for her PhD yesterday! Bianca's dissertation was a pleasure to read and her presentation was full of stunning visuals. The work is going to change the way people think about the microbiome soon. After this, Bianca will start a prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Vanessa Ezenwa's lab at Yale!

I am very pleased and honored to know that the lab will be funded by an NSF CAREER Award (DEB-2046797). The award will support ongoing collaborations with Yellowstone National Park for the next five years! During this time we will use dietary DNA metabarcoding to analyze the diets and microbiomes of migratory large mammals and connect this information with what we learn from ecological field experiments to better understand plant-herbivore interactions in this amazing ecosystem. We are excited to support many, many students and early career researchers in the classroom, laboratory, and at Yellowstone in ways that foster growth and improve representation in the field. This award complements and extends what we hope to accomplish through our ongoing NSF EPCSCoR (OIA-2033823) award and increases our current level of NSF support to four active awards.

I will post information about the first new opportunities to join the lab and work on projects like this one over the course of this summer.