Congratulations to our very own Caroline Wilson who took home the 1st place prize for best undergraduate presentation at this year’s 2020 Ecological Integration Symposium (EIS). Caroline worked closely with Cody Gale as her primary mentor in the lab. She also just submitted an Honor’s Thesis about her research. Caroline is graduating and moving on, but she will be missed. Good luck, Caroline!

The annual EIS meeting had to be held online this year due to the COVID apocalypse. The entire EIS including the awards ceremony has been archived here for your viewing pleasure.

We held our first virtual lab meeting under quarantine conditions today courtesy of the great coronavirus outbreak of 2020. A remarkable amount of work was accomplished. Great job to everyone in the lab for adapting to ever-changing circumstances and keeping up the good work!

Congratulations to Ashley for winning the 2020 Entomology Department Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Ashely very much deserved to win this award in recognition of her excellence in research, teaching and service. Very proud!

See full story here.

In support of the growing genomics component of the Sword Lab research program, we’ve added a Genomic & Data Resources page to the website. The page provides links to publicly available datasets and analysis tools generated (or forthcoming) from several really cool population genomics and whole genome sequencing efforts we are involved in.

Congratulations to Tyler who successfully defended his dissertation and will officially become Dr. Raszick in December.  Tyler’s work has already led to a postdoc project in collaboration with USDA-APHIS and USDA-ARS to refine boll weevil diagnostic assays based on his population genomics data.