Ruth A. Hufbauer, Colorado State University
Google Scholar Profile CV (as a pdf, July 2019) PNAS write-up that includes our research!
ruth.hufbauer@colostate.edu, C205B Plant Sciences
Department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management, Graduate Degree Program in Ecology
News and other thoughts
26 July 2019. I'm working with a local company - the Rocky Mountain Micro-Ranch (RMMR) that rears insects for food. It is so exciting to be planning experimental biology that can help fight world hunger, and produce proteins without using lots of water, and while contributing minimally to green-house gas production.
27 June 2019. It's Official!!!! We've been awarded an NSF grant. We (Brett Melbourne, CU Boulder PhD student Scott Nordstrom, postdoc TBD and I) are going to delve deeper into what enables populations to persist in the face of environmental change.
7 May 2019. Both Eliza Clark and Marcel Jardeleza were granted William M. Brown Professional Development Awards to attend the Ecology Society of America and SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) respectively. Congratulations, both!!
2 May 2019. Woohoo! Laure's paper was indeed accepted. The revision was quite major, and she did a great job on it. Of course everyone contributed, but she did by far the most work on it. Yay, Laure!
1 May 2019. Corinne Moss-Racusin's talk was fantastic. Such important data, described and explained so clearly.
23 April 2019. On May 1, I'm hosting Corinne Moss-Racusin to speak on her fascinating research on... us! She studies diversity and inclusion in STEM disciplines. Her talk is on understanding and overcoming gender bias in STEM. It will be in the LSC North Ballroom. Put it on your calendar! Reception at my house to follow.
25 March 2019. Laure O got her first paper back from review, with a decision of major revision. Fantastic news! In case you aren't familiar with the publication process, that means if we do our job well - take the suggestions seriously and do a good job revising the paper - then it is pretty darned likely to be accepted. This is always good news, but especially for Laure, as in the French PhD system, students must have a paper accepted to graduate.
5 March 2019. Hooray!! Both Eliza Clark and Marcel Jardeleza were awarded RMAIS grants from GDPE. RMAIS stands for Research Mentoring to Advance Inclusivity in Stem. I'm so pleased for both of them. AND this means we have two undergrad positions open in the lab for the summer!
4 March 2019 My second international scientist visiting this spring is Laure Olazcuaga, who has joined the lab from the CBGP (INRA, Montpellier, France) for two months. She's working on analyzing data from two major experiments and writing things up. It's great to have her here.
26 Feb. 2019. This spring semester, I am hosting two visiting scientists and two speakers. First on the list is Javad Karimzadeh who is visiting from Iran. He's an insect ecologist who works mostly on tri-trophic interactions. We are shopping about for interesting project to work on this summer. The office where former postdocs Kathryn Turner and Ellyn Bitume were had been empty for so long that I'd almost forgotten how nice it is to have someone to touch base with. It's great to have Javad here.
5 Feb. 2019. My Ecology (Life 320) class this semester is on the ball! I said something that didn't quite make sense, and wow did I hear about it. :) They're going to keep me on my toes, I can tell! Great interactive group. If it's possible, there are almost too many questions for the size of the class. Almost.
24 Jan 2019. I was appointed Co-Chair, along with Monique Rocca, of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty. Wow! What an honor. and Wow! I've got some work to do, and some streamlining of other service so that I can contribute to making CSU a great place for women to work and learn.
2 Jan. 2019 Happy New Year, everyone! I'm excited about the Spring 2019 semester. I'll be teaching Life 320 - Ecology. It's required for pre-vet and pre-med students, as well as natural resources and wildlife folks, etc. I work hard to make sure that the folks interested in medical careers understand the importance of the processes that influence the distribution and abundance of organisms. If we want to go for a hike, harvest wood for building, hunt, fish, conserve animals and plants, have clean air, produce healthy crops, we need to understand ecology. I also try to make sure that I cover a basic understanding of evolution. I currently have 147 people signed up and a long wait list. I need a bigger classroom!
7 Nov. 2018 CSU is going to have mentoring groups for women, that cut across discipline and rank. Woot! I'm on a three-person committee that is spearheading the effort. Look here (Source article) for more info! Mentoring circles are going to be great for women on the faculty at CSU.
29 October 2018: Wow, crazy two weeks. The experiment is starting to wind down, but isn't there yet. SO many beetles! So much tamarisk! So many flights! Luckily for me and Eliza, Ellyn Bitume was able to create the time to join us working. I don't know how we would have gotten to this point without her!! Thank you, Ellyn!! In other news, promotion and tenure shenanigans.... I'll be so happy when all those letters are sent off and my colleagues are promoted!!
14 October 2018: I'm working on massive experiments with Eliza Clark. I've put in more late nights in the lab than I have in years, and here I am on a Sunday afternoon at work! It's not that I don't ever work evenings and weekends, but when I do, it's typically from the comfort of home. Eliza is being heroic in her efforts. We bit of a bit more than we can chew, I'd say.
19 September 2018: The semester is in full swing!! So much going on. Committee work that is really important to me - with a focus on diversity and inclusion for the College of Ag and at the University level. Can't shirk that, eh? Plus teaching two grad classes (relatively easy ones, but no matter what, teaching takes and deserves time and effort), and then research. Right - Research. I love research.
30 August 2018: Now I'm in Switzerland at the ISBCW - that is the International Symposium on the Biological Control of Weeds. It's great, I'm tired. Eager to get home to my peeps at home and work. My students have been heroic about my long absence. I'm both apologetic and so proud of them.
18 August 2018: Wow, where did the summer go? I am in Montpellier for Evolution 2018. I'm excited to see folks I knew, meet folks new to me and soak in the good science!
24 May 2018: I went to China, and it was amazing.
10 April 2018: I'm so happy to report that Marcel Jardeleza will be joining my lab for grad school! Woot!!
23 March 2018: Look! We (Peer Community In folks) wrote a blog post for Rapid Ecology. Let the revolution begin! The post is rather long. The TLDR version is: let's review each others papers and circumvent the pricey publishing companies.
19 March 2018: I had a lovely spring break, during which my department head nominated me to be an ESA (Entomological Society of America) Fellow. She said the letters just glowed, which really is an award in and of itself.
28 February 2018: I'm so excited to be in Montreal! Going to give a talk at McGill tomorrow. What a department they have.
2 January 2018: Went to a really interesting lunchtime panel of women who had been to HERS leadership training. They are all such remarkable people, and it was so great to hear them talk about their experiences. My college doesn't have a clear path I could move along, but I can still work towards my vision.
1 January 2018: Three weeks of classes in, I think I've convinced the 150 students in my Ecology course that I'm on their side. The material is important, science is fascinating, I want you to learn, and I will help you do so as much as I possibly can.
11 January 2018. Woohoo! Congratulations to Megan Vahsen on getting one of her MS chapters accepted (pending reasonable revisions of course) to Biological Invasions. Way to go Megan! The work is neat - it's focused on how number of founders, timing of founding events, and prior adaptation of founders influences their ability to establish in a novel, challenging environment. Numbers and adaptation rule the day.
9 January 2018. Did you hear that? 2018?? Wow, 2018. Such a ring. Happy New Year, everyone. May this year bring good things in all areas of your life. In my life, right now, I'm prepping for teaching Ecology to 150 students. It's a big class!! The spring will be a fairly easy one in terms of research.
14 December 2017: Stacy Endriss defended her dissertation and did a FANTASTIC job. Go Stacy Go. We are going to miss you so much.
5 December 2017: I'm off to University of Minnesota where I'm giving a talk in Ecology and Evolutionary and Behavior. I was invited by Allison Shaw. I admire her work so much and am so flattered. So many other amazing people in that department (and in others) at UMN. I'm really excited to get to talk science with them. I also offered to give an updated version of my talk on gender and ethnicity in academia. Two seminars in one day. Oh boy. It's kinda like a job interview - people I admire and would love to give a good impression of me, all day meetings punctuated by two talks. Wish me luck!
28 November 2017: Have you all thought about how much evolution might influence invasions and range expansions? Populations don't just adapt to a new environment over the course of time after establishment - adaptation drives population size and rate of spread across a new range. We've proven it! Szucs et al. 2017 is out today, in PNAS. Heck yeah.
13 September 2017: The semester is in full swing. I'm teaching Gender and Ethnicity in Science, and my department's Intro to Gradschool course. Both are fun, and I'm learning new things. I'm lucky in the first one to have several graduate students from Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, who have experiencing with qualitative research. That's a big gap I have. I just love data so.
17 August 2017: Guys - how did it get to be August? How?? Well, time marches on. I have, since June, hiked in the alps, where I celebrated my 50th b-day, moved back to the US, got stuck in NY as it was too hot for the dog to fly safely (thanks worlds to Josh Drew, who put me up), helped out parents in Seattle, written an NSF grant proposal (fingers and toes crossed), participated in a Powell Center working group, attended a family reunion, and unpacked a few (too few!) boxes. It has been a veritable whirl wind!! I'm pleased to be welcoming Eliza Clark to the lab, and sad to be seeing Megan Vahsen off.
This coming semester I'll be teaching our course for 1st year graduate students (BSPM 500), as well as a graduate seminar on Gender and Ethnicity in Science (Ecol 592 004). That will be a challenge, but a good one.
6 June 2017: We had our good friends the Ghalambors to visit!! It was so fabulous to see them, though sadly marred by some of the party having the crud. It was really great to get to talk Science with a capital S with Cameron.
29 May 2017: I'm heading to Bruxelles for the day - taking the train up to visit Jean-Claude Grégoire and his lab, and learn how to fly insects. Yes. Fly insects, and measure flight speed, duration, etc. It will be a fun problem in engineering if we can get it going. I'll also give a talk Tuesday AM.
28 May 2017: It's hard to keep up here, because Weebly is blocked at work. Rather annoying, that. It's full Drosophila suzukii field season here. So. Many. Flies.
17 May 2017: Congratulations to Megan, on a fantastic masters defense! That talk would go over well as a job talk, frankly. I'm excited to see what comes of the PhD.
9 May 2017: So much good stuff going on I don't know where to begin. Stacy Endriss just got a decision of "revise" on her first manuscript submitted, and Marianna Szucs got a job offer at Michigan State. She will be taking over the former Delfosse lab. Wow. And, I missed posting about it, but a month or so ago, Megan Vahsen was awarded a prestigious Notebaert Primier Fellowhip at Notre Dame for her PhD starting Fall 2017 with Jason McLachlan. Apparently only the top 1% of PhD students get it. And I can tell you, she deserves it. Meanwhile, Kathryn Turner has been in the news. Next time Cheerios should hire an ecologist! Finally, I'd like to welcome Eliza Clark to the lab starting Fall 2017 She comes with excellent research experience and quantitative skills to work with me and Ellyn Bitume on the USDA NIFA grant we got awarded this spring!!
20 April 2017: I'm in Paris for a PCI meeting. Scientists working to change the world of publication! Let open and accessible science reign. https://peercommunityin.org/. Check out the cool video!
5 April 2017: WOW!!! I just found out that I'm going to be getting the first Faculty Institute for Inclusive Excellence Diversity Impact award. Shivers and thrills. I'm so honored. The folks in the CSU Diversity office are so outstanding and have taught me so much. They are the ones doing the hard work who deserve the honors, frankly.
22 February 2017: I'm spending the week on Réunion island with my colleagues and friends Virginie Ravigne and Benoit Facon. They are evolutionary biologists, a theoretician and an empiricist, respectively. Every time I talk to them I learn something. They're also just lovely people, and are hosting me at their house for my stay. Virginie and I went scuba diving (with 9 year old Noé!!) the day after I arrived, and today we're going to hike part of the crater around the volcano. I'm a lucky lucky gal. More about the work I'm doing here, and what La Réunion is like soon.
27 January 2017: Weiss-Lehman, Hufbauer and Melbourne (2017 Nature Communications) is out! It is open access and can be found here. See the write-up in the SOURCE, and on my sometime blog. We show experimentally that when a species is expanding its range, spatial evolutionary processes drive increased dispersal at the expanding edge, and increase rates of spread. We also have some evidence supporting the idea of gene surfing, as growth rates are suppressed at the expanding edge. In combination, mean expansion speed is higher in spatially structured populations than unstructured ones, but variance is larger, too. Thus, the evolution of spatial structure makes invasions and range expansions less predictable.
11 January 2017: I went to visit Luis-Miguel Chevin yesterday. He is starting some really fascinating empirical work! It was inspiring to think about. And also made me want even more to get the pre-proposal I'm working on to the next stage. I really think that diploid sexually obligate species are much needed in research to delimit the conditions underwhich adaptation from standing genetic variation can rescue populations from extinction. Genetic load, drift load and inbreeding load, will change the outcome.
7 January 2017: Happy New Year, all. May this year be a healthy and happy one for you. Let's all do good work to improve conditions around the world. Health, safety, and good books for all!
26 December 2016. It's been a Christmas of good news on publications - two days before Christmas Marianna's manuscript submitted to Ecology Letters got a decision of minor revision - that means as long as we do our job well, it should get accepted, and then Christmas day, the MB&E paper I mention below got accepted. Woot!! Publications are funny - 2016 is really a light publication year for me despite all this good publication news. Everything I've been working hard on will end up coming out in 2017. Marianna Szuc's paper is really great - we show that both the genetic and demographic make up of founders independently influence whether they establish, persist, and adapt. For adaptation, the demographic make up (number of individuals) becomes genetic over time, with the bottleneck imposed reducing genetic variation. It is such a pleasure working with Marianna - she thinks so deeply about the literature and the data and what they mean. Brett Melbourne, our collaborator, along with Ty Tuff and Topher Weiss-Leiman in his group, is just so great. Amazing writer and thinker, outstanding quantitative skills. Couldn't ask for better.
18 November 2016. Boom! Decision of revise. Molecular Biology and Evolution. I know I know we aren't supposed to care about impact factors, but mostly we do in fact care (mostly 'cause our bosses do), am I right? 13.6...The reviews are really nice, and suggested revisions that are quite minor, really. So great! The paper is about the routes of invasion of Drosophila suzukii world-wide, and use of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC, specifically ABC - random forest searches) to figure out that. I joined the project late, but made some real contributions to the writing. There's evidence for multiple introductions from the native range, and admixture among introduced populations.
17 November 2016. You are reading the words of the new member of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty.
15 November 2016. Marianna's paper is now officially resubmitted to Ecology Letters. We put so much work into it. I didn't think I could understand that dataset better, but now I do. Editor.... Have mercy!
11 November 2016. This is it... I'm submitting my application to become Director of GDPE. I think I could really do some great things for the program. I'm competing against some awesome people, though. It would be difficult to be sad to see them leading the charge, but I tell ya - I'm the one for the job!! :) I also recently applied to serve on the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty. I would SO much love to be in both positions. Fingers crossed. I definitely have the background and skills to succeed in them, and am hoping being on sabbatical won't keep me from getting involved. 7 Dec. update - did not get the GDPE position, but Colleen Webb did. I think she'll be great. I would have been, too, though! The regret is balanced by relief, so I'm not too disappointed.
2 November 2016. Woohooo!! Weiss-Lehman, Hufbauer and Melbourne just got accepted to Nature Communications. It's a super cool paper - very deserving of some flash. Evolution makes invasions less predictable, and also speeds spread across the landscape. So neat. Next up, Szucs et al. will be resubmitted to Ecology Letters.
10 October 2016. One more paper submitted! I'm a fairly minor collaborator on this one, but I put in a decent amount of time editing and organizing and asking for clarifications. It is work with my main host at CBGP - Arnaud Estoup. We submitted to MBE - Molecular Biology and Evolution. It makes me think of the late, and yes great, Rick Harrison, who I did a postdoc with. Back then, we published a paper in Molecular Ecology, and he thought very little of that journal at the time, and thought we should submit to MBE. I felt out of my element and league, with my background as a quantitative geneticist rather than a population geneticist. We went to Molecular Ecology, and it got it. It was a good paper. My PhD advisors were wonderful in many ways, but did not edit my work in detail. Rick's edits to that paper were my first real glimpse into how collaborative writing could work, and into how much I had to learn about writing a good paper.
20 September 2016. One paper resubmitted (Weiss-Lehman et al.) and two more in revision. I've had three reject and resubmit decisions in a row. As an editor, I really tried to avoid that - either revise or reject! But apparently 'reject and resubmit' is the new 'major revision'. Whatever it's called, going through the papers with a fine tooth comb is improving them, that's for sure. Will be so happy to have the next two out the door to focus on the new submissions waiting on the sidelines.
6 September 2016. How did the month fly by so quickly? I've started at CBGP. So far so good. I give a talk on the 23rd of this month. Time to start prepping!
3 August 2016 Je suis arrivée en France! I'm staying at a friend's house 'til I take over the new chez nous demain matin. La famille joins me Friday.
2 August 2016. Fabulous. While traveling a paper was submitted. It's work that has been in progress for a long time, in collaboration with Simon Tavener (math dept) and 3 great undergrads (or now, former undergrads moving on to great graduate programs). So happy to have it out, and fingers crossed for reasonable and helpful reviews.
25 July 2016 Second (but largest) of several going away parties took place last night. So fun to see friends here - it made me miss them already. This week I'm in a Powell Center (USGS) meeting all week on predicting insect invasions.
21 July 2016. NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow Ellyn Bitume has gotten another postdoc, starting 2017 with the USDA in Albany CA. I'm so pleased for her and so proud of her. It is an outstanding fit for her and for them. It will be sad not to come back from sabbatical to her experimental prowess, funny stories, and enthusiasm for work and life, though.
4 July 2016. Packing packing packing. So much packing. I leave for France 1 August, the family follows on the 4th. Je suis dans les cartons. I still have some projects I want to finish and get submitted, but time is getting short.
7 June, 2016. How'd it get to be June? Woke up to the nice news that an opinion piece was published.
17 May, 2016. Our visas were granted! Nous allons en France.
16 May, 2016 Megan Vahsen got a spot on a NASA Develop team! Awesome. Plus, newly minted Dr. Fettig got a paper accepted with minor revisions.
Plus, the semester is over! I had excellent feedback from students on my big Ecology class. There are always to make it even better, but I was pleased with the semester. Several people told me it completely opened their eyes to whole new research fields. One student from 2 years ago came to visit to say good bye since he was graduating, and he told me that he is starting vet school in the the fall to study wildlife epidemiology, having been inspired by the disease ecology section of my course. #winning.
28 April, 2016 I think my public Catts lecture at WSU went reasonably well. I enjoyed giving it anyway, and several people gave me good feedback. I'm really looking forward to talking about all the awesomely cool experimental data tomorrow. That's the best. An great part of today was having Gomulkiewicz (amazing theoretician) tell me that a recent pub of mine influenced parts of his current modeling paper. Wait, wut??! *squeeeee*
27 April, 2016 Tomorrow I give my first "public" lecture - talking science to a general, community audience. I'm excited about it. I'm also nervous about whether or not I've hit the level right - will it be clear enough to the 'public' and yet still interesting to the biologists?? I hope so. I'd like to get more feedback from my lab, but... I'm already here in Pullman. I'm also hoping for a good crowd! I hope folks come.
26 April, 2016. Today has been a big day, I was dealt quite an emotional blow, but also had a minor but meaningful victory. I learned that my postdoc advisor, Rick Harrison, died suddenly 2 weeks ago, likely from a heart attack. I learned so much about writing from him, as well as how to enjoy life as a scientist. I'm so saddened by his death. More about him soon. The good part of the day is that both I, and my PhD student Stacy Endriss, were awarded Shepardson teaching awards. I'm honored to be recognized. I put a lot into my teaching, and it's so rewarding to feel appreciated.
31 March, 2016. Christa Fettig is now..... DR. Fettig!! Congratulations, Christa.
15 March., 2016 Paper accepted! It's an Annual Review article on whether successful invasions pose a genetic paradox, with my fabulous French colleagues - Arnaud Estoup of CBGP at the helm. I tried to convince them that nothing is paradoxical. If it seems so, its simply ignorance. All the 'odd' cases where invasions proceed despite strong genetic bottlenecks have reasonable biological explanations if you look closely. I didn't quite convince them, but close enough. A reviewer said, "this is a GREAT review, one of the best I’ve seen.' How often do you get that? Milkshake time!
9 March., 2016 I gave my talk yesterday on Diversifying Academia a second time yesterday to the Biology department here. I think it went pretty well. Dan Bush, vice provost for faculty affairs, was present, which is great. He is a powerful advocate for equality on campus. Tomorrow I'm doing it one more time! This time back in the Ag. college, my stomping grounds, for Soil and Crop sciences. In the Ag College we tend to have much less diversity of all sorts than in Natural Sciences where Biology is. It's a tough audience. I'm looking forward to the challenge.
29 Feb., 2016 My PhD student Stacy Endriss has been named a VPR Fellow!! Congratulations, Stacy. She is one of 12 university wide. And here is the video of the big event.
22 Feb., 2016 I'm giving a presentation today titled: "Engaging large classes: The not-quite flipped classroom." It's at noon in 102 Shepardson. Be there! Key points: 1. engaging students helps them learn, to engage them we need to be allies not adversaries. 2. writing with pen and pencil forces synthesis - I make this happen by using the white board. Slides are for graphs and pictures, not words.
Feb. 2016 seems to be the month that EVERYONE is giving me a draft of a paper I'm on. It is both awesome and daunting. So much to read, write, edit.
19 Jan., 2016 DAY ONE of spring semester 2016. Exciting! Always loved the first day of school and still do, despite my panic to get ready.
14 Jan., 2016 There's an article in the Source about my research with Brett Melbourne! :)
7 Jan., 2016 I'm gearing up for the new semester. At the top of my work list are: proposal reviews, leading an NSF preproposal, and prepping for teaching Ecology. I love the course, and want to change a few things up this year. Hi ho!
At the end of last semester I was IN THE NEWS! University news, but still, a nice write-up of our work.
8 Dec., 2015: Bonjour de France! I'm here for the PhD defense of Thibaut Morel-Journel. He has done a really great combination of modeling and experiments. I'm looking forward to a good discussion tomorrow. Then I head to Montpellier, where I will work on organizing next years' hoped-for sabbatical. Woot!
9 Nov., 2015: Welcome, Kathryn Turner. Kathryn is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow joining my lab and John McKay's lab jointly. She did her PhD with Loren Rieseberg at UBC. She'll be doing a cool ancient DNA work tracing the genetic changes during invasion using current and herbarium specimens.
19 Oct., 2015: Our PNAS letter is out!! Woohoo!! Or should I say, Wootten! Thanks Wootten and Pfister for the nice little repartee. Here's a link to
the extract of their letter.
18 Oct., 2015: My talk on women and underrepresented minorities in academia went well - good turn out, good questions, and good feedback from folks who were there. I'm so pleased.
14 Oct., 2015: Come see my talk on Diversifying Academia in Clark C146 12:00-12:50!
10 Oct., 2015: I'm giving a departmental seminar next week that started out as focused solely on Women in Science, but that I've now extended to Diversifying Academia. I'm presenting largely data studies on bias. While women (white women) still have a ways to go in academia and business, what any other group faces is so much more extreme. It seemed absurd to not talk about underrepresented minorities in the context of this talk. So I'm taking the plunge.
7 Oct., 2015: I'm super excited about moving part of my research efforts over to Drosophila suzukii. This vinegar fly doesn't just attack rip and rotting fruit, but also fruit ripening on the plant. There are so many interesting evolutionary questions to address with it, all of the genetic tools from D. melanogaster to bring to bear... And it really matters to agricultural production in the US and France, where I'll be on sabbatical next year.
28 Sept., 2015: Ooh, glamorous - Tim Wooten and Cathy Pfister wrote a thoughtful letter about our recent PNAS paper, we wrote a reply, and they're going to be published! What fun to have a good intellectual discussion, and how sweet to have the bonus of getting that discussion in press.
25 Sept., 2015: YAY MEGAN!! Congratulations to Megan Vahsen, who got the prize for best student poster at the EMAPi meeting in Hawaii. She is studying the role of propagule pressure in invasion in collaboration with Kat Shea's lab group and this dataset was on the Tribolium system,
24 Sept., 2015: I contributed a guest post to Dynamic Ecology today! It is on the score sheets that are used at some institutions for ranking candidates for tenure track positions. What fun to have such quick feedback and interest in something I've written. The post was inspired by helping a friend with job applications and improved by discussion with Jeremy Fox and Josh Drew.
Useful- status of local trails
Older news posts
ruth.hufbauer@colostate.edu, C205B Plant Sciences
Department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management, Graduate Degree Program in Ecology
News and other thoughts
26 July 2019. I'm working with a local company - the Rocky Mountain Micro-Ranch (RMMR) that rears insects for food. It is so exciting to be planning experimental biology that can help fight world hunger, and produce proteins without using lots of water, and while contributing minimally to green-house gas production.
27 June 2019. It's Official!!!! We've been awarded an NSF grant. We (Brett Melbourne, CU Boulder PhD student Scott Nordstrom, postdoc TBD and I) are going to delve deeper into what enables populations to persist in the face of environmental change.
7 May 2019. Both Eliza Clark and Marcel Jardeleza were granted William M. Brown Professional Development Awards to attend the Ecology Society of America and SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) respectively. Congratulations, both!!
2 May 2019. Woohoo! Laure's paper was indeed accepted. The revision was quite major, and she did a great job on it. Of course everyone contributed, but she did by far the most work on it. Yay, Laure!
1 May 2019. Corinne Moss-Racusin's talk was fantastic. Such important data, described and explained so clearly.
23 April 2019. On May 1, I'm hosting Corinne Moss-Racusin to speak on her fascinating research on... us! She studies diversity and inclusion in STEM disciplines. Her talk is on understanding and overcoming gender bias in STEM. It will be in the LSC North Ballroom. Put it on your calendar! Reception at my house to follow.
25 March 2019. Laure O got her first paper back from review, with a decision of major revision. Fantastic news! In case you aren't familiar with the publication process, that means if we do our job well - take the suggestions seriously and do a good job revising the paper - then it is pretty darned likely to be accepted. This is always good news, but especially for Laure, as in the French PhD system, students must have a paper accepted to graduate.
5 March 2019. Hooray!! Both Eliza Clark and Marcel Jardeleza were awarded RMAIS grants from GDPE. RMAIS stands for Research Mentoring to Advance Inclusivity in Stem. I'm so pleased for both of them. AND this means we have two undergrad positions open in the lab for the summer!
4 March 2019 My second international scientist visiting this spring is Laure Olazcuaga, who has joined the lab from the CBGP (INRA, Montpellier, France) for two months. She's working on analyzing data from two major experiments and writing things up. It's great to have her here.
26 Feb. 2019. This spring semester, I am hosting two visiting scientists and two speakers. First on the list is Javad Karimzadeh who is visiting from Iran. He's an insect ecologist who works mostly on tri-trophic interactions. We are shopping about for interesting project to work on this summer. The office where former postdocs Kathryn Turner and Ellyn Bitume were had been empty for so long that I'd almost forgotten how nice it is to have someone to touch base with. It's great to have Javad here.
5 Feb. 2019. My Ecology (Life 320) class this semester is on the ball! I said something that didn't quite make sense, and wow did I hear about it. :) They're going to keep me on my toes, I can tell! Great interactive group. If it's possible, there are almost too many questions for the size of the class. Almost.
24 Jan 2019. I was appointed Co-Chair, along with Monique Rocca, of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty. Wow! What an honor. and Wow! I've got some work to do, and some streamlining of other service so that I can contribute to making CSU a great place for women to work and learn.
2 Jan. 2019 Happy New Year, everyone! I'm excited about the Spring 2019 semester. I'll be teaching Life 320 - Ecology. It's required for pre-vet and pre-med students, as well as natural resources and wildlife folks, etc. I work hard to make sure that the folks interested in medical careers understand the importance of the processes that influence the distribution and abundance of organisms. If we want to go for a hike, harvest wood for building, hunt, fish, conserve animals and plants, have clean air, produce healthy crops, we need to understand ecology. I also try to make sure that I cover a basic understanding of evolution. I currently have 147 people signed up and a long wait list. I need a bigger classroom!
7 Nov. 2018 CSU is going to have mentoring groups for women, that cut across discipline and rank. Woot! I'm on a three-person committee that is spearheading the effort. Look here (Source article) for more info! Mentoring circles are going to be great for women on the faculty at CSU.
29 October 2018: Wow, crazy two weeks. The experiment is starting to wind down, but isn't there yet. SO many beetles! So much tamarisk! So many flights! Luckily for me and Eliza, Ellyn Bitume was able to create the time to join us working. I don't know how we would have gotten to this point without her!! Thank you, Ellyn!! In other news, promotion and tenure shenanigans.... I'll be so happy when all those letters are sent off and my colleagues are promoted!!
14 October 2018: I'm working on massive experiments with Eliza Clark. I've put in more late nights in the lab than I have in years, and here I am on a Sunday afternoon at work! It's not that I don't ever work evenings and weekends, but when I do, it's typically from the comfort of home. Eliza is being heroic in her efforts. We bit of a bit more than we can chew, I'd say.
19 September 2018: The semester is in full swing!! So much going on. Committee work that is really important to me - with a focus on diversity and inclusion for the College of Ag and at the University level. Can't shirk that, eh? Plus teaching two grad classes (relatively easy ones, but no matter what, teaching takes and deserves time and effort), and then research. Right - Research. I love research.
30 August 2018: Now I'm in Switzerland at the ISBCW - that is the International Symposium on the Biological Control of Weeds. It's great, I'm tired. Eager to get home to my peeps at home and work. My students have been heroic about my long absence. I'm both apologetic and so proud of them.
18 August 2018: Wow, where did the summer go? I am in Montpellier for Evolution 2018. I'm excited to see folks I knew, meet folks new to me and soak in the good science!
24 May 2018: I went to China, and it was amazing.
10 April 2018: I'm so happy to report that Marcel Jardeleza will be joining my lab for grad school! Woot!!
23 March 2018: Look! We (Peer Community In folks) wrote a blog post for Rapid Ecology. Let the revolution begin! The post is rather long. The TLDR version is: let's review each others papers and circumvent the pricey publishing companies.
19 March 2018: I had a lovely spring break, during which my department head nominated me to be an ESA (Entomological Society of America) Fellow. She said the letters just glowed, which really is an award in and of itself.
28 February 2018: I'm so excited to be in Montreal! Going to give a talk at McGill tomorrow. What a department they have.
2 January 2018: Went to a really interesting lunchtime panel of women who had been to HERS leadership training. They are all such remarkable people, and it was so great to hear them talk about their experiences. My college doesn't have a clear path I could move along, but I can still work towards my vision.
1 January 2018: Three weeks of classes in, I think I've convinced the 150 students in my Ecology course that I'm on their side. The material is important, science is fascinating, I want you to learn, and I will help you do so as much as I possibly can.
11 January 2018. Woohoo! Congratulations to Megan Vahsen on getting one of her MS chapters accepted (pending reasonable revisions of course) to Biological Invasions. Way to go Megan! The work is neat - it's focused on how number of founders, timing of founding events, and prior adaptation of founders influences their ability to establish in a novel, challenging environment. Numbers and adaptation rule the day.
9 January 2018. Did you hear that? 2018?? Wow, 2018. Such a ring. Happy New Year, everyone. May this year bring good things in all areas of your life. In my life, right now, I'm prepping for teaching Ecology to 150 students. It's a big class!! The spring will be a fairly easy one in terms of research.
14 December 2017: Stacy Endriss defended her dissertation and did a FANTASTIC job. Go Stacy Go. We are going to miss you so much.
5 December 2017: I'm off to University of Minnesota where I'm giving a talk in Ecology and Evolutionary and Behavior. I was invited by Allison Shaw. I admire her work so much and am so flattered. So many other amazing people in that department (and in others) at UMN. I'm really excited to get to talk science with them. I also offered to give an updated version of my talk on gender and ethnicity in academia. Two seminars in one day. Oh boy. It's kinda like a job interview - people I admire and would love to give a good impression of me, all day meetings punctuated by two talks. Wish me luck!
28 November 2017: Have you all thought about how much evolution might influence invasions and range expansions? Populations don't just adapt to a new environment over the course of time after establishment - adaptation drives population size and rate of spread across a new range. We've proven it! Szucs et al. 2017 is out today, in PNAS. Heck yeah.
13 September 2017: The semester is in full swing. I'm teaching Gender and Ethnicity in Science, and my department's Intro to Gradschool course. Both are fun, and I'm learning new things. I'm lucky in the first one to have several graduate students from Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, who have experiencing with qualitative research. That's a big gap I have. I just love data so.
17 August 2017: Guys - how did it get to be August? How?? Well, time marches on. I have, since June, hiked in the alps, where I celebrated my 50th b-day, moved back to the US, got stuck in NY as it was too hot for the dog to fly safely (thanks worlds to Josh Drew, who put me up), helped out parents in Seattle, written an NSF grant proposal (fingers and toes crossed), participated in a Powell Center working group, attended a family reunion, and unpacked a few (too few!) boxes. It has been a veritable whirl wind!! I'm pleased to be welcoming Eliza Clark to the lab, and sad to be seeing Megan Vahsen off.
This coming semester I'll be teaching our course for 1st year graduate students (BSPM 500), as well as a graduate seminar on Gender and Ethnicity in Science (Ecol 592 004). That will be a challenge, but a good one.
6 June 2017: We had our good friends the Ghalambors to visit!! It was so fabulous to see them, though sadly marred by some of the party having the crud. It was really great to get to talk Science with a capital S with Cameron.
29 May 2017: I'm heading to Bruxelles for the day - taking the train up to visit Jean-Claude Grégoire and his lab, and learn how to fly insects. Yes. Fly insects, and measure flight speed, duration, etc. It will be a fun problem in engineering if we can get it going. I'll also give a talk Tuesday AM.
28 May 2017: It's hard to keep up here, because Weebly is blocked at work. Rather annoying, that. It's full Drosophila suzukii field season here. So. Many. Flies.
17 May 2017: Congratulations to Megan, on a fantastic masters defense! That talk would go over well as a job talk, frankly. I'm excited to see what comes of the PhD.
9 May 2017: So much good stuff going on I don't know where to begin. Stacy Endriss just got a decision of "revise" on her first manuscript submitted, and Marianna Szucs got a job offer at Michigan State. She will be taking over the former Delfosse lab. Wow. And, I missed posting about it, but a month or so ago, Megan Vahsen was awarded a prestigious Notebaert Primier Fellowhip at Notre Dame for her PhD starting Fall 2017 with Jason McLachlan. Apparently only the top 1% of PhD students get it. And I can tell you, she deserves it. Meanwhile, Kathryn Turner has been in the news. Next time Cheerios should hire an ecologist! Finally, I'd like to welcome Eliza Clark to the lab starting Fall 2017 She comes with excellent research experience and quantitative skills to work with me and Ellyn Bitume on the USDA NIFA grant we got awarded this spring!!
20 April 2017: I'm in Paris for a PCI meeting. Scientists working to change the world of publication! Let open and accessible science reign. https://peercommunityin.org/. Check out the cool video!
5 April 2017: WOW!!! I just found out that I'm going to be getting the first Faculty Institute for Inclusive Excellence Diversity Impact award. Shivers and thrills. I'm so honored. The folks in the CSU Diversity office are so outstanding and have taught me so much. They are the ones doing the hard work who deserve the honors, frankly.
22 February 2017: I'm spending the week on Réunion island with my colleagues and friends Virginie Ravigne and Benoit Facon. They are evolutionary biologists, a theoretician and an empiricist, respectively. Every time I talk to them I learn something. They're also just lovely people, and are hosting me at their house for my stay. Virginie and I went scuba diving (with 9 year old Noé!!) the day after I arrived, and today we're going to hike part of the crater around the volcano. I'm a lucky lucky gal. More about the work I'm doing here, and what La Réunion is like soon.
27 January 2017: Weiss-Lehman, Hufbauer and Melbourne (2017 Nature Communications) is out! It is open access and can be found here. See the write-up in the SOURCE, and on my sometime blog. We show experimentally that when a species is expanding its range, spatial evolutionary processes drive increased dispersal at the expanding edge, and increase rates of spread. We also have some evidence supporting the idea of gene surfing, as growth rates are suppressed at the expanding edge. In combination, mean expansion speed is higher in spatially structured populations than unstructured ones, but variance is larger, too. Thus, the evolution of spatial structure makes invasions and range expansions less predictable.
11 January 2017: I went to visit Luis-Miguel Chevin yesterday. He is starting some really fascinating empirical work! It was inspiring to think about. And also made me want even more to get the pre-proposal I'm working on to the next stage. I really think that diploid sexually obligate species are much needed in research to delimit the conditions underwhich adaptation from standing genetic variation can rescue populations from extinction. Genetic load, drift load and inbreeding load, will change the outcome.
7 January 2017: Happy New Year, all. May this year be a healthy and happy one for you. Let's all do good work to improve conditions around the world. Health, safety, and good books for all!
26 December 2016. It's been a Christmas of good news on publications - two days before Christmas Marianna's manuscript submitted to Ecology Letters got a decision of minor revision - that means as long as we do our job well, it should get accepted, and then Christmas day, the MB&E paper I mention below got accepted. Woot!! Publications are funny - 2016 is really a light publication year for me despite all this good publication news. Everything I've been working hard on will end up coming out in 2017. Marianna Szuc's paper is really great - we show that both the genetic and demographic make up of founders independently influence whether they establish, persist, and adapt. For adaptation, the demographic make up (number of individuals) becomes genetic over time, with the bottleneck imposed reducing genetic variation. It is such a pleasure working with Marianna - she thinks so deeply about the literature and the data and what they mean. Brett Melbourne, our collaborator, along with Ty Tuff and Topher Weiss-Leiman in his group, is just so great. Amazing writer and thinker, outstanding quantitative skills. Couldn't ask for better.
18 November 2016. Boom! Decision of revise. Molecular Biology and Evolution. I know I know we aren't supposed to care about impact factors, but mostly we do in fact care (mostly 'cause our bosses do), am I right? 13.6...The reviews are really nice, and suggested revisions that are quite minor, really. So great! The paper is about the routes of invasion of Drosophila suzukii world-wide, and use of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC, specifically ABC - random forest searches) to figure out that. I joined the project late, but made some real contributions to the writing. There's evidence for multiple introductions from the native range, and admixture among introduced populations.
17 November 2016. You are reading the words of the new member of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty.
15 November 2016. Marianna's paper is now officially resubmitted to Ecology Letters. We put so much work into it. I didn't think I could understand that dataset better, but now I do. Editor.... Have mercy!
11 November 2016. This is it... I'm submitting my application to become Director of GDPE. I think I could really do some great things for the program. I'm competing against some awesome people, though. It would be difficult to be sad to see them leading the charge, but I tell ya - I'm the one for the job!! :) I also recently applied to serve on the Standing Committee on the Status of Women Faculty. I would SO much love to be in both positions. Fingers crossed. I definitely have the background and skills to succeed in them, and am hoping being on sabbatical won't keep me from getting involved. 7 Dec. update - did not get the GDPE position, but Colleen Webb did. I think she'll be great. I would have been, too, though! The regret is balanced by relief, so I'm not too disappointed.
2 November 2016. Woohooo!! Weiss-Lehman, Hufbauer and Melbourne just got accepted to Nature Communications. It's a super cool paper - very deserving of some flash. Evolution makes invasions less predictable, and also speeds spread across the landscape. So neat. Next up, Szucs et al. will be resubmitted to Ecology Letters.
10 October 2016. One more paper submitted! I'm a fairly minor collaborator on this one, but I put in a decent amount of time editing and organizing and asking for clarifications. It is work with my main host at CBGP - Arnaud Estoup. We submitted to MBE - Molecular Biology and Evolution. It makes me think of the late, and yes great, Rick Harrison, who I did a postdoc with. Back then, we published a paper in Molecular Ecology, and he thought very little of that journal at the time, and thought we should submit to MBE. I felt out of my element and league, with my background as a quantitative geneticist rather than a population geneticist. We went to Molecular Ecology, and it got it. It was a good paper. My PhD advisors were wonderful in many ways, but did not edit my work in detail. Rick's edits to that paper were my first real glimpse into how collaborative writing could work, and into how much I had to learn about writing a good paper.
20 September 2016. One paper resubmitted (Weiss-Lehman et al.) and two more in revision. I've had three reject and resubmit decisions in a row. As an editor, I really tried to avoid that - either revise or reject! But apparently 'reject and resubmit' is the new 'major revision'. Whatever it's called, going through the papers with a fine tooth comb is improving them, that's for sure. Will be so happy to have the next two out the door to focus on the new submissions waiting on the sidelines.
6 September 2016. How did the month fly by so quickly? I've started at CBGP. So far so good. I give a talk on the 23rd of this month. Time to start prepping!
3 August 2016 Je suis arrivée en France! I'm staying at a friend's house 'til I take over the new chez nous demain matin. La famille joins me Friday.
2 August 2016. Fabulous. While traveling a paper was submitted. It's work that has been in progress for a long time, in collaboration with Simon Tavener (math dept) and 3 great undergrads (or now, former undergrads moving on to great graduate programs). So happy to have it out, and fingers crossed for reasonable and helpful reviews.
25 July 2016 Second (but largest) of several going away parties took place last night. So fun to see friends here - it made me miss them already. This week I'm in a Powell Center (USGS) meeting all week on predicting insect invasions.
21 July 2016. NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow Ellyn Bitume has gotten another postdoc, starting 2017 with the USDA in Albany CA. I'm so pleased for her and so proud of her. It is an outstanding fit for her and for them. It will be sad not to come back from sabbatical to her experimental prowess, funny stories, and enthusiasm for work and life, though.
4 July 2016. Packing packing packing. So much packing. I leave for France 1 August, the family follows on the 4th. Je suis dans les cartons. I still have some projects I want to finish and get submitted, but time is getting short.
7 June, 2016. How'd it get to be June? Woke up to the nice news that an opinion piece was published.
17 May, 2016. Our visas were granted! Nous allons en France.
16 May, 2016 Megan Vahsen got a spot on a NASA Develop team! Awesome. Plus, newly minted Dr. Fettig got a paper accepted with minor revisions.
Plus, the semester is over! I had excellent feedback from students on my big Ecology class. There are always to make it even better, but I was pleased with the semester. Several people told me it completely opened their eyes to whole new research fields. One student from 2 years ago came to visit to say good bye since he was graduating, and he told me that he is starting vet school in the the fall to study wildlife epidemiology, having been inspired by the disease ecology section of my course. #winning.
28 April, 2016 I think my public Catts lecture at WSU went reasonably well. I enjoyed giving it anyway, and several people gave me good feedback. I'm really looking forward to talking about all the awesomely cool experimental data tomorrow. That's the best. An great part of today was having Gomulkiewicz (amazing theoretician) tell me that a recent pub of mine influenced parts of his current modeling paper. Wait, wut??! *squeeeee*
27 April, 2016 Tomorrow I give my first "public" lecture - talking science to a general, community audience. I'm excited about it. I'm also nervous about whether or not I've hit the level right - will it be clear enough to the 'public' and yet still interesting to the biologists?? I hope so. I'd like to get more feedback from my lab, but... I'm already here in Pullman. I'm also hoping for a good crowd! I hope folks come.
26 April, 2016. Today has been a big day, I was dealt quite an emotional blow, but also had a minor but meaningful victory. I learned that my postdoc advisor, Rick Harrison, died suddenly 2 weeks ago, likely from a heart attack. I learned so much about writing from him, as well as how to enjoy life as a scientist. I'm so saddened by his death. More about him soon. The good part of the day is that both I, and my PhD student Stacy Endriss, were awarded Shepardson teaching awards. I'm honored to be recognized. I put a lot into my teaching, and it's so rewarding to feel appreciated.
31 March, 2016. Christa Fettig is now..... DR. Fettig!! Congratulations, Christa.
15 March., 2016 Paper accepted! It's an Annual Review article on whether successful invasions pose a genetic paradox, with my fabulous French colleagues - Arnaud Estoup of CBGP at the helm. I tried to convince them that nothing is paradoxical. If it seems so, its simply ignorance. All the 'odd' cases where invasions proceed despite strong genetic bottlenecks have reasonable biological explanations if you look closely. I didn't quite convince them, but close enough. A reviewer said, "this is a GREAT review, one of the best I’ve seen.' How often do you get that? Milkshake time!
9 March., 2016 I gave my talk yesterday on Diversifying Academia a second time yesterday to the Biology department here. I think it went pretty well. Dan Bush, vice provost for faculty affairs, was present, which is great. He is a powerful advocate for equality on campus. Tomorrow I'm doing it one more time! This time back in the Ag. college, my stomping grounds, for Soil and Crop sciences. In the Ag College we tend to have much less diversity of all sorts than in Natural Sciences where Biology is. It's a tough audience. I'm looking forward to the challenge.
29 Feb., 2016 My PhD student Stacy Endriss has been named a VPR Fellow!! Congratulations, Stacy. She is one of 12 university wide. And here is the video of the big event.
22 Feb., 2016 I'm giving a presentation today titled: "Engaging large classes: The not-quite flipped classroom." It's at noon in 102 Shepardson. Be there! Key points: 1. engaging students helps them learn, to engage them we need to be allies not adversaries. 2. writing with pen and pencil forces synthesis - I make this happen by using the white board. Slides are for graphs and pictures, not words.
Feb. 2016 seems to be the month that EVERYONE is giving me a draft of a paper I'm on. It is both awesome and daunting. So much to read, write, edit.
19 Jan., 2016 DAY ONE of spring semester 2016. Exciting! Always loved the first day of school and still do, despite my panic to get ready.
14 Jan., 2016 There's an article in the Source about my research with Brett Melbourne! :)
7 Jan., 2016 I'm gearing up for the new semester. At the top of my work list are: proposal reviews, leading an NSF preproposal, and prepping for teaching Ecology. I love the course, and want to change a few things up this year. Hi ho!
At the end of last semester I was IN THE NEWS! University news, but still, a nice write-up of our work.
8 Dec., 2015: Bonjour de France! I'm here for the PhD defense of Thibaut Morel-Journel. He has done a really great combination of modeling and experiments. I'm looking forward to a good discussion tomorrow. Then I head to Montpellier, where I will work on organizing next years' hoped-for sabbatical. Woot!
9 Nov., 2015: Welcome, Kathryn Turner. Kathryn is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow joining my lab and John McKay's lab jointly. She did her PhD with Loren Rieseberg at UBC. She'll be doing a cool ancient DNA work tracing the genetic changes during invasion using current and herbarium specimens.
19 Oct., 2015: Our PNAS letter is out!! Woohoo!! Or should I say, Wootten! Thanks Wootten and Pfister for the nice little repartee. Here's a link to
the extract of their letter.
18 Oct., 2015: My talk on women and underrepresented minorities in academia went well - good turn out, good questions, and good feedback from folks who were there. I'm so pleased.
14 Oct., 2015: Come see my talk on Diversifying Academia in Clark C146 12:00-12:50!
10 Oct., 2015: I'm giving a departmental seminar next week that started out as focused solely on Women in Science, but that I've now extended to Diversifying Academia. I'm presenting largely data studies on bias. While women (white women) still have a ways to go in academia and business, what any other group faces is so much more extreme. It seemed absurd to not talk about underrepresented minorities in the context of this talk. So I'm taking the plunge.
7 Oct., 2015: I'm super excited about moving part of my research efforts over to Drosophila suzukii. This vinegar fly doesn't just attack rip and rotting fruit, but also fruit ripening on the plant. There are so many interesting evolutionary questions to address with it, all of the genetic tools from D. melanogaster to bring to bear... And it really matters to agricultural production in the US and France, where I'll be on sabbatical next year.
28 Sept., 2015: Ooh, glamorous - Tim Wooten and Cathy Pfister wrote a thoughtful letter about our recent PNAS paper, we wrote a reply, and they're going to be published! What fun to have a good intellectual discussion, and how sweet to have the bonus of getting that discussion in press.
25 Sept., 2015: YAY MEGAN!! Congratulations to Megan Vahsen, who got the prize for best student poster at the EMAPi meeting in Hawaii. She is studying the role of propagule pressure in invasion in collaboration with Kat Shea's lab group and this dataset was on the Tribolium system,
24 Sept., 2015: I contributed a guest post to Dynamic Ecology today! It is on the score sheets that are used at some institutions for ranking candidates for tenure track positions. What fun to have such quick feedback and interest in something I've written. The post was inspired by helping a friend with job applications and improved by discussion with Jeremy Fox and Josh Drew.
Useful- status of local trails
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