Graduate student Andrew Kanarek received first place recognition for his poster "Predicting invasion success by modeling ecological and evolutionary dynamics" at the Resource Modeling Association meetings in Cape Cod, MA June 19-22.

Assistant Professor Colleen Webb has been re-appointed to another three year term as external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, NM.

Tyler Zarubin, a graduate student in the laboratory of Don Mykles, defended his thesis titled: "Cloning, expression, and biological activity of crustacean hyperglycemic hormone in the eyestalk ganglia of the black-back land crab, Gecarcinus lateralis" on August 10th. He is very happy and is doing well.

Aryn Wilder, a student in Mike Antolin's lab and a research fellow with the CDC laboratories here in Fort Collins (advised by Scott Bearden, Ken Gage, and Becky Eisen), defended her thesis titled: "Transmission of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis by the prairie dog fleas Oropsylla hirsuta and Oropsylla tuberculata cynomuris (Siphonaptera: ceratophyllidae)" on July 10th. Aryn has moved to New York where she's pursuing her interests in conservation biology and infectious diseases.

The NIH summer students working in labs across campus this summer are the following: Irene Tumuna -- working in Dr. Florant's lab Melissa Lopez-- working in Dr. Tamkun's lab Mark Goodwin-- working in Dr. Ishii's lab Keyona Gullett-- working in Dr. Kanatous's lab Jennifer Jamison--working in Dr. Sanborn's Lab Leena Ngugen-- Working in Dr. Hamilton's lab Jane Ma-- working in Dr. Earley's lab

Special Assistant Professor Arathi Seshadri attended the International Pollination Symposium at Ames, IA June 24 -28 and presented a poster describing the influence of floral traits on pollination success.

Dr. Greg Florant will be in Washington, D.C. the week of July 11-14th to present his report on the activities of the Porter Physiology Development committee to the American Physiological Society.

Dr. Greg Florant will be conducting research at Toolik Field Station in Alaska from July 31th to Aug. 8th. Florant has been chosen to participate in the University of Alaska's INBRE program.

Assistant Professor Mark Simmons traveled to Chicago to present a talk at the Botany & Plant Biology 2007 Joint Congress, after which he worked at the Field Museum. He then traveled to the Missouri Botanical Garden where he worked at the herbarium and presented a seminar.

Prof. Don Mykles was at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab doing research on molting in crabs and lobsters.

Postdoc John Freeman, presented a mini-symposium at the 2007 American Society of Plant Biologists Joint Congress, in Heavy Metals and Phytoremediation, titled "Evolutionary and Ecological Aspects of Selenium Hyperaccumulation."

Graduate student Christine Bacon is co-author on a July 2007 Theoretical and Applied Genetics paper: "Levering the Rice Genome Sequence for Monocot Comparative and Translational Genomics" with H.C. Lohithaswa, F.A. Feltus, H.P. Singh, C.D. Bailey, and A.H. Paterson.

Postdoctoral fellow Joseph Covi authored a paper with his former Ph.D. advisor Steven Hand (LSU) in the current issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: "Energizing an invertebrate embryo: bafilomycin-dependent respiration and the metabolic cost of proton pumping by the V-ATPase." Joe is currently a postdoc in Don Mykles' lab.

Simmons, M.P., K. Müller and A.P. Norton. 2007. The relative performance of indel-coding methods in simulations. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 44: 724-740.

A new publication from the Selenium Project was published in the July issue of New Phytologist by John L. Freeman, Stormy Dawn Lindblom, Colin F. Quinn, Matthew Marcus, Sirine Fakra, & Elizabeth A. Pilon-Smits (2007) "Selenium accumulation protects plants from herbivory by Orthoptera via toxicity and deterrence." New Phytologist, 175, 490-500.