Congratulations to Emily Humble for winning the best student presentation award at the Marine Mammal Biennial Conference!

Well done to David Vendrami for winning a Young Investigator Award at the Seventh International Oyster Symposium!

Congratulations to Erin Bauer for winning the prize for the second best poster at the annual DZG meeting.

Hearty congratulations to Luke Eberhart-Phillips for getting the best possible grade for his PhD thesis – a summa cum laude.  Luke gave an awesome talk, and the party wasn’t too bad either 😉  Best of luck to Luke for the future!

We sadly say a premature farewell to William Handel, a visiting PhD student of Greg Charrier, who broke his collar bone in a freak skateboarding accident 😦  We hope he has a good trip back to Brittany and wish him a speedy recovery.

David, Michele and I had a fun and successful trip to Brittany and the northern french coast to collect clams (Mya arenaria).  We’re grateful to our collaborator Greg Charrier, as well as to my parents in law, Bob and Janine, for a very warm welcome!  We are also eternally grateful to Jaques Grall for telling us exactly where to look for Mya.

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Well done David, whose work on the genetics of great scallops has been published in the Royal Society of Open Science.

You can read a press release here.

Martin is leaving us for a little while to work in the field on elephant seals with Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse. Hope they have a great season!

Congratulations to Martin for winnimg a Genetics Society Heredity Fieldwork Grant.  This will help fund his fieldwork in Mexico, where he plans to study  elephant seal microbiomes.

Well done to David Vendrami for his star appearance on our local television station, WDR.  To see David talking about shellfish genetics and climate change (article in German) see:

http://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/video/sendungen/lokalzeit-ostwestfalen-lippe/video-lokalzeit-owl-1028.html