Tis’ the season of visitors!

April is here, and in Okinawa this means the start of rainy season and temperature rising up… In our lab, this is also the time of the year we welcome the most visitors!

Claire Morandin, EMBO long-term fellow, is one of our favorite and frequent visitor who has been working with Vienna this year on a honey bee experiment.

We also welcome a long term visitor (January-July 2019), Chao Dong, postdoctoral researcher from the Linksvayer lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Chao is here to prepare and sequence many ants and spiders for his collaborative work between Sasha and the Linkvasyer group.

Manasee Weerathunga joined us as a research intern from Sri Lanka (February-April 2019), and has been analyzing with an undefeatable determination, to better understand the leaf-cutting ant foraging using a dataset from Sasha’s graduate expereinece in 2003.

Elroy Kwan-Au joined us as a honour student from ANU, and will prepare libraries and sequence museum samples of the beautiful variegated fairywren Malurus lamberti and related species for three months. He will return to Canberra and will analyze these data for his honour “Population genomics of climate change in the purple-backed fairy wren”.