First up, some awards:

• Majo has been awarded the Philomathia Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Sciences! This is a prestigious fellowship for UC Berkeley graduate students, "Students are nominated to receive the award on the basis of their high level of academic distinction and exceptional promise." https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/philomathiacenter/graduate-student-fellowship-environmental-sciences

• Becca was elected as a councilor for the Society of Systematic Biologists. Her term starts in January 2025.

Conference updates

• Becca, Kannon, and Natalie attended SSAR 2024. Kannon gave a fabulous rendition of his Turnin’ the frickin’ frogs gay talk. Natalie presented a poster on her senior research project. Becca presented on a paper currently in review about passive accumulation of alkaloids in non-toxic poison frogs.

• Becca, Kannon, Valeria, and Majo are heading to WCH 10 in Malaysia in 2 weeks.

Personnel updates

• Sophie Draper started as our new lab technician. Sophie just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota. She has experience with snail husbandry, fieldwork in Africa, people / project management, and research in genomics.

• Nuzha Baksh said goodbye as she heads to Athens, Georgia to start a PhD.

• We got two pet frogs for the lab (Dendrobates tinctorius). They were named Denny’s and IHOP after some disagreements about restaurant preferences arising from Kannon’s after-fieldwork dinners.

• Adri Jeckel started in July as a new postdoc. She will be working on the toxic flies and poison frog projects.

Fieldwork

• Becca went to Ecuador in May to gather samples for the NSF project on color in poison frogs, in collaboration with Santiago Ron. The field season was productive but the samples are still in Ecuador because airlines refuse to carry on the dry shipper. She also visited collaborators at USFQ including Juan Manuel Guaysamín who will be working this fall with Majo trying to cultivate tetrodotoxin-producing bacteria from Atelopus.

• Majo traveled to Colombia for her final field season of the PhD to collect samples of a few species of Harlequin toads that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Working with Beto Rueda and his team she was able to obtain even more samples and species that she had hoped for.

In July 2023, Poppy Northing left the lab to start graduate school at the University of Arizona. In September 2023, we hired Nuzha Baksh as our new lab technician. Nuzha comes to us after spending a year in Madagascar in the Brook lab at U Chicago.

It’s been almost 2 years since we had our last group photo. Thanks to Carlie McGill for taking these for us. We are currently 16 strong with 4 graduate students, 2 postdocs, and 10 undergraduate students. Go Bears!

Back Row (Left to Right): Ines Huret (ugrad), Bri Baumbach (ugrad), Genna Mount (pdoc, in paper), Vashee Shenthan (ugrad), Kannon Pearson (grad student), Luis Jazo (ugrad), Rebecca Tarvin (PI), Inga Conti-Jerpe (pdoc, in paper), Puja Iyer (ugrad), Ameya Joshi (ugrad), Tyler Douglas (grad student)

Front Row (Left to Right): Marc Bonnot (ugrad), Nikki Lemus (postbac), Majo Navarrete (grad student), Valeria Ramírez Castañeda (grad student), Jacob Saal (ugrad)

It’s grant season…

• Valeria was awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant from the Center for Latin America Studies at UC Berkeley

• Valeria, Majo, and Tyler each received funding from the MVZ for summer research

• Kannon Pearson was recognized by the Rausser College Dean’s Office of Instruction and Student Affairs Award Committee with the Kenneth L. Babcock Prize in Environmental Science for his outstanding research and outreach efforts. Kannon will be joining us as a new graduate student in the fall.

• TBD was awarded an NSF PRFB and will be joining the lab in the fall. More information soon!

• Sofia Beskind, currently an undergraduate researcher in the Matz Lab at UT Austin, will be joining us this summer to do research on Epipedobates, funded by an NSF REU grant that she received. Congrats Sofia!

Novia Kayfetz-Vuong is a new undergraduate in the lab. She will be picking up the RNAseq project on nudibranchs started by Yin Chen Wan and Noah Martin. Welcome Novia!