It was a week full of awesome lab successes, and capped by Rachel Brant’s excellent dissertation talk and defense last Friday. For her talk, Rachel focused in on two chapters that formed the bulk of her fieldwork with sweat bees: an analysis of pollen foraging behaviors across urban, suburban, and exurban sites, along with lots of environmental variables and a brain RNA-seq study from bees at these same sites. Many thanks also to her committee, Bob Marquis, Nathan Muchhala, and Mike Arduser.
We will be all be seeing papers from this work later this year- her chapter 1 review manuscript is accepted, chapter 2 on foraging behavior is under review, and the manuscript from chapter 3 is pending some additional data from this summer. Chapter 4 is under revision after co-author comments.
Rachel managed an extremely productive four years in the lab and we are all thrilled for her next challenge as a post doc at the Missouri Botanic Garden.
Dunlap Cognitive Ecology Lab 