On April 4th, Rohit Rohra successfully passed his final evaluation for his PPiB program, and in doing so will receive his M.S. Biotechnology in May 2017. He presented his program portfolio and research experiences to his committee and he was passed unanimously. Congratulations Rohit!
I participated in the Wakonse South Teaching conference held in Burnet, Texas over the weekend of March 31st. Other than being in a gorgeous location and the perfect time to be there, I had my mind blown repeatedly during some of the teaching workshops I attended there. I came back with some ideas to overhaul my own teaching, especially my undergrad genetics course. During the downtime in the conference, I made full use of the opportunity to be out and…
With the increased attention that golden-cheeked warblers are getting, with efforts to delist the species, I believe it is a great opportunity to educate and inform the lay population, as well as the very active birding community it Texas, about what the demographic recovery means and what it doesn’t. To follow up my talks in the last year with Audubon San Antonio and Texas Ornithological Society, I will be talking about this topic at Travis Audubon in May this year.
The endangered golden-cheeked warbler is making news again. Some groups in the state believe that the bird must be removed from the endangered species list, and hence open up land for urban development. Last time around (in 2015), the USFWS did not find sufficient evidence that the species had recovered enough to be taken off the list. The fact remains that Athrey et al showed in 2011 that the genetic diversity had declined so steeply in the past 100 years,…
M.S. Biotechnology student Rohit Rohra (set to graduate in May 2017) was awarded the Outstanding Graduate student award following his presentation at the Biotechnology Advisory Council meeting on February 10th. His presentation was on the work he is doing in our lab, analyzing whole genome sequence data from multiple chicken breeds from around the world. His project identified specific high-impact genetic variants unique to specific chicken breeds. Congratulations Rohit!
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…
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.
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…
