Martin is also leaving us for a while.  He’s heading off to Cape Town on a 25 day biological cruise organised by the Maritime University.  We wish him a fantastic trip!

Emily is heading off to Bird Island, South Georgia, to spend a field season working on fur seals.  best of luck and have a wonderful time!

After a nine-month internship in our lab, sadly we have to say goodbye to Lucy, who will be returning to Glasgow to finish her degree.  Lucy did a fantastic job and even managed to find the causal polymorphism for blonde coat colouration in seals!   We wish her all the best of luck and hope to see her again.

Sadly, Hatice’s Erasmus exchange has come to an end.  We wish her a fond farewell and the best of luck for the future!

A big welcome to Hatice Gokalp, who will be spending two months in the lab as an Erasmus exhange student.  She will be working together with David Vendrami on the population genetics of European clams.

A big welcome to Michele de Noia, who is joining the lab as an Early Stage Researcher on the CACHE project.

The Hoffman lab are one of this year’s recipients of the Floragenex 2016 RAD-Seq Processing Award.  We are grateful to Floragenex for supporting our work on heterozygosity and fitness in fur seals.

A big welcome to Stefanie Grosser, who is starting a DFG-funded postdoc with ourselves and Jochen Wolf’s lab.  Stefanie will be working on pinniped genomics with a particular focus on Galapagos sea lion speciation genomics.

Merry Christmas to everybody from the Hoffman lab!  Pictured is (most of) the group together with Matthias Galipaud at the Christmas market before Emily and Martin headed off to the Marine Mammal Biennial meeting in San Francisco.  We hope they have a great and productive time 🙂

Our intrepid adventurers have made it to the Snaefellnes Peninsula by bike! Next stop, Middalir. We wish them a fun trip and no strong headwinds 🙂