Our “lab” has grown to 20 people! I put “lab” in quotes because we’re really more of a “collaboration network”.
Shown above (left to right): Nakul Wewhare, Gerry Carter, Sam Walmsley, Shailee Shah, Haley Gmutza, Victor Nieto Caballero, Will Rogers, Bryson Loflin, Jacob Chisausky, Dante Durso, Tobias Nguyen, Kelly Mitzel, Rose Habib, Ixtle Montuffar.
People not shown: Gabriel Ovideo, May Dixon, Raven Hartman, Luisa Gómez-Feuillet, Melissa Lopez, Jorge Lopez, Guadalupe Garcia C., Laura Espinosa Ochoa
I’m really psyched that we have three exceptional new postdocs. We hired Dr. Sam Walmsley (PhD at Dalhousie with Hal Whitehead) as a Postdoctoral Scientist to work on the causes and consequences of social integration. Dr. Will Rogers (PhD at Yale with Vanessa Ezenwa) was awarded a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship from Princeton University, and he is working on feedbacks between disease and sociality. Dr. Shailee Shah (PhD at Columbia with Dustin Rubenstein, and coming from a postdoc at Cornell) was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and she is working on the evolution and ecology of social behavior in Superb Starlings in Africa.
We also hired three great new staff members. At the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, we recruited Panamanian biologist Melissa Lopez and Costa Rican biologist Gabriel Oviedo Cortés to help us run our long-term experiments on cooperative relationships in vampire bats. At Princeton, we hired bat biologist Dante Durso to join our staff to help us run similar long-term experiments here.
I did not take new graduate students this year, but we have several students who are collaborating with us. Victor Nieto Caballero is a Neuroscience PhD student who is doing a rotation in our lab to work on analyzing vocal sequences and behavior in vampire bats, in collaboration with PhD student Nakul Wewhare. Jacob Chisausky is a PhD student co-advised by Corina Tarnita and Simon Levin who is developing new theory about the evolution of cooperation and partner choice. Three Princeton undergraduates majoring in Ecology and Evolution (Rose Habib, Ixtle Montuffar, and Laura Espinosa Ochoa) are working with us to write their senior research thesis. Yuchen Chen and Nic Beckles visited our lab over the summer as predoctoral fellows and they both developed independent research projects. Recent Princeton graduate Phaedra van der Molen is developing her (award-winning) senior thesis into a publication on the vocal repertoire of vampire bats.
In total, we now have a great mix of people at all career stages: 4 postdocs, 3 staff at Princeton, 4 staff in Panama, 3 PhD students, 3 collaborating PhD students based in other labs, and 3 undergraduates. To learn more about each lab member, check out their websites or Google Scholar profiles on the People page. The website of PhD student Nakul is a nice glimpse of recent advances in understanding vampire bat vocal communication. The website of my PhD student Bryson where he has an interactive game where you can be a vampire bat.
I am extremely lucky to have recruited this group of exceptional individuals. I am continuously impressed by each of them, and it is immensely enjoyable to talk to them each week about what they are doing and thinking about. It is like a team of superheroes, each with different superpowers. The other extraordinary thing is that there’s been no conflicts over credit or egos and I really don’t foresee this at all into the future. Everyone is kind and collaborative. Everyone gets along and works together well. I used to lament the gradual transition from being a working scientist doing the fun stuff to becoming more of a people manager and grant writer. But I feel like the people in my group will do work that is much more impressive than what I’ve done as a student or postdoc. It’s exhilarating. Having a graduate student “fledge” from the lab is one of the great joys of this job among many others.
I want to thank the two extraordinary people who have really managed the lab over the last year: postdoc Dr. May Dixon, who has coordinated the research in Panama, and our lab manager Kelly Mitzel who has coordinated the research at Princeton. Without these two people, I would not have kept my sanity over the last year.
A related update: our new lab space is almost complete! Our department recently moved into a brand new building and Princeton has acquired an off-campus location for additional animal space. So, for the last two years, we have been in a “temporary lab space”– an infamous phrase familiar to many academic scientists. All universities tend to run out of lab space, and the spaces they do have often need renovation. The situation is so common that the biologist Oded Rechavi popularized a funny social media meme which pairs an appropriate photo with the phrase “it’s only a temporary space until we renovate a place for you” .
But I must say that I’ve been really impressed by the support of the competent and helpful staff at Princeton. Even the temporary spaces that were renovated for us have been terrific! When I was a PhD student, the first bat colony I managed was in space that used to be a broom closet. I had to build a flight cage using my own money, materials from Home Depot, funds that I crowdsourced by asking for donations from the internet. So having dedicated vets, animal care staff, and custom lab spaces is like science heaven. I try to tell my lab “you don’t realize how great we have it here!”
I am excited about all the science that will start coming out over the next months and years. We’ve made some pretty cool discoveries this year already and we just need to write them up. I hope to share more about that soon in future posts.
