Current Lab Happenings
We are very excited to welcome three new undergrad students to the Brosi lab this winter: Emma Wells, Mahika Rao, and Dylan Strauss! This quarter they will learn how to process insect specimens, focusing on pinning, sorting, and IDing pollinators for our Quantitative Nestedness project. Welcome to the Brosi lab!
Congratulations to Annie Schiffer (as well as Loy, Connor, and Berry) for recently publishing a paper in the American Journal of Botany! Their paper titled “Differences in individual flowering time change pollen limitation and seed set in three montane wildflowers” used snowmelt acceleration treatments to examine the relationship between individual phenology and fecundity of three plant species. Read the full paper here!
Huge congrats to Dr. Connor Morozumi and Dr. Donna McDermott for defending their dissertations this week! The Brosi Lab reunited in Atlanta for their defenses (both on the same day, in a “defense double header”). Connor and Donna both had amazing presentations! Connor’s dissertation focused on how plant-pollinator networks respond to perturbation, and Donna’s focused on ecology teaching assessments and social cues in bee foraging. After completing their PhDs, Connor will start a postdoc at University of Louisville and Donna will start in a faculty position in the Emory Writing Center.
We’re happy to announce that we have a new PhD student starting this fall: Annie Colgan! Annie is currently a student contractor for the USGS Rocky Mountain Science Center and is interested in ecological communities and global change. She is visiting UW and our lab this weekend to meet everyone in person and check out the UW campus and Seattle neighborhoods. We can’t wait for her to join us in the fall!
Laura’s work on antibiotics in agriculture and bee foraging was highlighted in the UW News and Emory News last week! In the articles, Berry and Laura talked about their recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B which found that exposure to streptomycin reduces bumblebee learning and foraging. Laura conducted this study in the lab and will test it in the field this spring in eastern Washington. We are very excited about this work and that it was highlighted in the UW and Emory news.