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!

A great opportunity is available for a three year PhD studentship to work on the genomic analysis of host-microbe interactions in Antarctic fur seals. The position will combine lab work and the bioinformatic analysis of next generation sequencing data.

The deadline for applications is 1st November 2022. All materials should be e-mailed as a single PDF to: joseph.hoffman[at]uni-bielefeld.de with ‘PhD application’ in the subject line.

Please see the attached PDF for more details about the position and do not hesitate to contact me with any questions at joseph.hoffman[at]uni-bielefeld.de.

Thank you to everyone that attended our Polar Genomics workshop, organised as part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Priority Programme 1158, “Antarctic Research with Comparative Investigations in Arctic Ice Areas”.  Special thanks also to our three excellent plenary speakers – Melody Clark, Charlotte Havermans, and Ken Halanych! We look forward to seeing you all again soon!

Massive congratulations to Kosmas Hench for winning a one-year fellowship from the Bielefeld Young Researcher’s Fund Career Bridge PhD-Postdoc. Kosmas will be joining the group to develop his own project proposal to work on Antarctic fur seal genomics. Welcome, Kosmas!

A great opportunity is available for a three year PhD studentship to work on the genomic analysis of dispersal and adaptation in porcini mushrooms. The position will combine fieldwork in Germany, the UK, France and Spain with lab-based bioinformatic analysis of next generation sequencing data.

The deadline for applications is 1st March 2022. All materials should be e-mailed as a single PDF to: joseph.hoffman[at]uni-bielefeld.de with ‘PhD application’ in the subject line.

Please see the attached PDF for more details about the position and do not hesitate to contact me with any questions at joseph.hoffman[at]uni-bielefeld.de.