Category Archives: career

How Molecular Ecologists Work: David Toews on the joy of making figures, reading in the field, and the magic track pad

Welcome to the next installment of How Molecular Ecologists Work! This entry is from Dr. David Toews, Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell University. David’s uses genomic data in combination with phenotypic, geographic, and behavioral data to ask questions about the … Continue reading

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How Molecular Ecologists Work: Aaron Shafer on the perfect sentence, making phone calls, and German hip-hop

Welcome to the next installment of the How Molecular Ecologists Work series! For this entry, we have Dr. Aaron Shafer, who is currently transitioning from a postdoc position at Uppsala University to an assistant professor position at Trent University. Aaron … Continue reading

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How Molecular Ecologists Work: Tracy Heath on TSA precheck, writing on your desk, and not having an alarm clock

Welcome to the next installment of How Molecular Ecologists Work! This entry is from Dr. Tracy Heath, assistant professor at Iowa State University. Tracy and her lab develop methods and models for inferring phylogenetic relationships. Some of these approaches have included using paleontological data … Continue reading

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How Molecular Ecologists Work: J. Chris Pires on mono-tasking, not doing it all yourself, and defining that dream job

Welcome to the next installment of the How Molecular Ecologists Work series.This entry is from Dr. J. Chris Pires, associate professor within the Division of Biological Sciences at The University of Missouri. His work is broadly described as plant evolutionary … Continue reading

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My review of Lab Girl for the LA Review of Books

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. NB: Cross-posted from my personal blog. You have surely, by now, heard all about Hope Jahren’s terrific scientific memoir Lab Girl, including as one of my … Continue reading

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What do dolphins, bivalves and algae have in common?

Collaboration as it turns out, between three scientists interested in vertebrates, invertebrates and algae! A few days before we left for Evolution 2016 in Austin, one of my collaborators, Eric Pante, came to Charleston as the final stop in a North American … Continue reading

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How Molecular Ecologists Work: Brant Faircloth on good headphones, one Dropbox to rule them all, and being nice

Welcome to the first installment of How Molecular Ecologists Work! This entry is from Dr. Brant Faircloth, assistant professor of computational biology at Louisiana State University. Brant’s work broadly revolves around elucidating the factors that shape biological diversity. In practice, he … Continue reading

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Introducing "How Molecular Ecologists Work"

I’ve always been fascinated by how people get all their work done. Scientists in particular make for a great study of working habits for two main reasons: they typically juggle a variety of tasks and they largely determine their own work schedules. This results … Continue reading

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Personal narrative of a journey from zoos to academia

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. Back in February, the South Carolina Aquarium and The Center for Humans and Nature hosted the finale in the Holland Lifelong Learning series of “Why do … Continue reading

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3 writing mistakes I make

Last week my university hosted Dr. Joshua Schimel, microbiologist and author of Writing Science, who led a half-day writing workshop for graduate students. To be honest, I didn’t expect my writing to improve after a 4-hour workshop, but I learned a … Continue reading

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