John Sanderson defended his dissertation on "Hydrology and Conservation of Intermountain Wetlands", on June 30. Congratulations to Dr. Sanderson and his advisor Dr. David Steingraeber.

Kelly Hardwicke defended her dissertation "Prairie Dogs, Plants, and Pollinators: Tritrophic Interactions Affect Plant-Insect Floral Visitor Webs in Shortgrass Steppe" on July 20th. Please congratulate Dr. Hardwicke and her major advisor, Dr. Jim Detling (aka The Great One).

Christine Albano defended her thesis on "Structural and Functional Responses of Aquatic Macroinvertebrate Communities to Streamflow Diversion in Rocky Mountain Streams", on July 7. Congratulations to Christine and her advisor Dr. LeRoy Poff.

Dale Richardson defended his thesis on "Comprehensive comparative analysis of kinesins in photosythetic eukaryotes", on June 29. Congratulations to Dale and his advisor Dr. ASN Reddy.

The Pilon-Smits lab welcomes Dr Ana de Castro, native of Portugal and visiting post-doc from the Netherlands. Dr Castro will be at CSU in July, August and September 2006 for collaborative work in the area of phytoremediation.

Graduate students Miriam Loeffler and Colin Quinn, Post doc John Freeman III and Profs Elizabeth Pilon-Smits and Marinus Pilon will attend the Annual meeting of the American Society for Plant Biology (ASPB) in Boston, MA, August 5-9, 2006. All will present posters.

Marinus Pilon will attend the Gordon conference on "Mitochondria and Chloroplasts" to be held in Oxford, UK, from August 13-18.

Profs Elizabeth-Pilon Smits and Marinus Pilon attended the 13th International Symposium on Iron Nutrition and Interactions in Plants, held at the INRA in Montpellier, France, July 3-7. They presented a poster and gave an invited talk.

Assistant Professor Lisa Angeloni travels to Tours, France July 24 - July 31 to attend and present a paper at the 11th Congress of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology.

Antolin, M.F., T.A. Bjorksten, and T. T. Vaughn. 2006. Host-related fitness trade-offs in a presumed generalist parasitoid, Diaeretiella rapae (Hymenoptera: Aphidiidae). Ecological Entomology 31: 242-254. (Tracey Bjorksten (post-doc) has returned to Australia, where she works as a researcher in Melbourne, Ty Vaughn (Ph.D.) is now a researcher with Monsanto in St. Louis).

Mark Simmons completed the Triple Bypass bicycle ride on July 8th - in the rain. The Triple Bypass is 120 miles long and goes over three mountain passes (Juniper, Loveland, Vail) for 10,000 feet of elevation gain. What a dude!

Mark Simmons completed the Mt. Evans Hillclimb on July 23rd. The bicycle hillclimb tops out at 14,264 feet after gaining 6,724 feet in 28 miles. Not quite so dudical, but nonetheless quite the feat!