Etienne and Joe just returned from a short but very successful visit to Spain, where we attended the Mycoforum 2025 living lab mycotour, collected Boletus pinophilus samples for genetic analysis, visited experimental plots and discussed mushroom science! A great time was had by all. We would like to thank our wonderful host and collaborator, Fernando Martínez-Peña!

A massive congratulations to Juan Masello, who has been appointed to an adjunct professorship at the Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Agriculture, University of Venda, South Africa. For more information, see: https://www.univen.ac.za/news/a-prolific-scientist-professor-masello-delivers-a-fascinating-inaugural-lecture/.

We are happy to announce that Bernice Sepers has won a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship to investigate the relationship between inbreeding and DNA methylation in Antarctic fur seals! We are really happy for Bernice and are grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding this project.

Congratulations to Kees Wanders, who just won a postdoctoral fellowship from the Bielefeld Young Researcher’s Fund to write his own postdoc. Kees will be joining us to work on the population genomics of shorebirds.

A massive congratulations to Kosmas Hench, who just secured his own postdoctoral fellowship to join the lab to work on the population genomics of Antarctic fur seals! We are grateful to the DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm Antarktisforschung for funding his project.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Special Issue on Polar Genomics (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genes/special_issues/Polar_Genomics) guest edited by Joe, Melody and Svenja.  The Special Issue contains 15 empirical papers plus a short editorial.  We are grateful to the Special Priority Programme Antarktisforschung for their support, as well as to all of those who contributed articles.

Ramona has been accepted for an international advanced PhD course (summer school) on the ‘Ecologically relevant oceanographic processes in the Northeastern Atlantic’ offered by the University of the Faroe Islands. This course, which will take place in late August in Tórshaven, Faroe Islands, promises an exciting journey and opportunity to learn about the oceanography of the Northeastern Atlantic

Ramona won ‘best talk’ at the PhD days of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI), a conference for AWI-PhD students, held at the Telegrafenberg in Potsdam at the end of May

Congratulations to Bernice Sepers for winning a postdoctoral fellowship from the Bielefeld Young Researcher’s Fund to develop her own project working on fur seal epigenetics. We are looking forward to welcoming Bernice to the lab early next year!

It was a great pleasure to host the coordination meeting of the Schwerpunktprogramm 1158‒Antarktisforschung here in Bielefeld. Much exciting science was discussed and a great time was had by all!