Welcome Yoann, Felix and Volans!

The lab expanded significantly in the last few months, despite substantial COVID challenges. Yoann was the first to make it over from France in January. He started his PhD project on the evolution of ligand specificity in CHC-sensitive odorant receptors, which is a collaboration with the Liebig lab in Arizona State University. Next came Felix from Germany. He’s already extracting Pogonomyrmex barbatus samples sent over by Deborah Gordon, for a project on the evolutionary genomics of colony-level variation in foraging behavior in collaboration with the Gordon lab in Stanford. Finally, Volans arrived from Taiwan (after finishing his PhD in Kyoto). He joined the main project in the lab – the evolution of social structure in Cataglyphis. He is starting to look at additional species beyond our focal species C. niger.