I went to the PAG meeting in San Diego from the 13th- 17th. It was my first trip to this conference, and was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of topics and expertise there. I hung out with the chicken genomics community who are a very social and welcoming group, and its nice to put faces to names you see on papers. Met some people I know from way back and also a lot of new people. The plenary talks were outstanding, and…
2016 was one for the record books. A strange, contorted, misfitting year. The year that didn’t belong, and the year that nobody wanted and asked for, and no one deserved. But we got it and we lived through it. so long 2016. Let the sun forever set on the likes of you.
I recently returned from a trip to India where I visited the Wildlife Institute of India, with whom we will be starting some work. My trip included two separate visits to national parks in India. Among the exciting things I got to see were wild Red Junglefowl which were tripping over each other at Rajaji National Park (near Dehradun), and also Gray Junglefowl at Bandipur National Park, not to mention two herds of pachyderms, dozens of peacocks!a myriad of other amazing…
Congrats to Rohit on his presentation at the Biotechnology mini-research conference. This was an opportunity for him to present a poster on research he completed during the Spring 2016 semester. His poster was titled: “In silico verification of miRNAs in the chicken genome”. Nice job Rohit!
PhD student Shawna Peerh presented a plan of her research to her committee this week. She put together a terrific presentation and is off to a great start.
Congratulations to postdoc Hoa Nguyen-Phuc on the publication of one of his papers from his PhD work! view the publication here or here: Nguyen-Phuc-et al 2016
Postdoc Hoa Nguyen-Phuc and I traveled to Tennessee to the property of a gentleman (Mr. Don Shadow) who has been one of the more successful people to keep Red Junglefowl in captivity. Through the contacts and great help of Dr. I. Lehr Brisbin ( professor emeritus at University of Georgia), we were able to coordinate the transfer of these birds so we can attempt to establish our own colony here. It was a tremendous excitement for me to see these…
A very happy new year to all! Undergrad Jason Pizzini graduated in Dec 2015, but will be returning (hopefully) to complete some left over lab work. Undergrad Hamza Khan will be returning as well to continue his project on nutrition-micriobiome interactions in wild birds. We are about to travel to Tennessee to bring back some Red Junglefowl (Richardson’s strain). This is a big moment for our program. Red Junglefowl are considered the principal ancestor to all domesticated chicken. In their…
This one was a while in the making, but its finally out: my new paper published in PLoS One. This work took the spatial genetic data collected from Black-Capped Vireos to its logical extreme, by using it to estimate parentage information within the population, and infer offspring dispersal distances based on that data. Happy to see this get published, and thanks to a skeptical anonymous reviewer, who really helped make it a better paper.
Our postdoc, Hoa is leading a short crash course on using R. Everyone got to learn how to write and execute basic functions and loops in R. Then Hoa used real data to demonstrate how to run iterations of sampling with replacement, and plot some graphics.
