UC Davis Chancellor Gary May interviewed Rachael Bay as part of his series, Face to Face. Chancellor May learned about corals, climate change, getting undergrads into research in genomics, and a bit of what it's like to be one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10."

We're thrilled to announce that the 2023 cohort of Sloan Research Fellows includes Professor Kate Laskowski. The Sloan Research Fellowship, a prestigious award given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes early-career scientific researchers seen as emerging leaders in their fields.

UC Davis environmental toxicologist Andrew Whitehead recently was interviewed by The Conversation Weekly. The podcast described three case studies, including Andrew's work, that demonstrate how humans can drive rapid evolution in natural systems. Andrew's research documents populations of killifish that thrive in polluted estuaries. But rather than a source of optimism, Andrew describes this as a "cautionary tale."

Bumble bees are some of the world’s most important pollinators, yet many bumble bee species are in decline.  Our understanding of how landscape changes affect bumble bees is often limited to studies of where they forage on flowers.  Through this project, REU students will test how bumble bees use landscapes throughout their life cycles. Students will compare the behavior and abundance of bumble bees across habitat types. We hypothesize that bees use different habitat types for nesting vs.

Urban flower gardens are growing in popularity, and have the potential to contribute significantly to pollinator habitat.  However, it is unknown whether these gardens provide a safe haven for declining populations or create low quality habitat that contributes little to conservation. Monarch butterflies are abundant in urban gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area. One concern is that monarch caterpillars in cities experience increased risk of predation by human-associated animals such as paper wasps and yellow jackets.

Jay Stachowicz' research recently was featured by the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences. Stachowicz is part of a global network that studies seagrasses and the organisms that live in coastal seagrass beds. They found that genetics influences on seagrasses dating back to Pleistocene glaciation have influenced the genetic diversity, size, and community structure of seagrasses even more than current conditions. 

Popular Science just named Rachael Bay as one of the 2022 Brilliant 10. 

Woohoo, congratulations, Rachael!

Congratulations to Professor Rachael Bay and the Bay Lab denizens!

The Bay Lab recently received the 2022 Grand Prize for lab safety from UC Davis Safety Services. 

The selection committee praised the Rachael and lab manager Brenda Cameron for their dedication to fostering a research culture that minimizes risk. That's a tall order, when lab personnel work at lab benches at UC Davis, walk-in aquarium rooms, eelgrass flats at dawn, or coral reefs in Moorea. 

The EERREC program includes a science communication workshop, with a 3-minute video as capstone experience.

It's summertime!

Summer in Davis brings sunflowers in bloom and the arrival of the EERREC 2022 Cohort. They've gotten settled in campus housing, reacquainted themselves with bikes, and are becoming part of their lab and campus community.

Check out our Scholars page to learn more about them -- you can search using "2022" in the Position box. We'll add more info in the weeks to come.

Seagrasses form vast underwater meadows that provide habitat for countless other organisms and directly influence key ecosystem processes like carbon storage and erosion control.  But seagrasses are also under threat from human-caused changes in the environment such as warming temperature and cloudy water. Jay Stachowicz seeks to understand how genetic diversity within eelgrass, a seagrass found throughout the northern hemisphere, provides resilience to this species and the ecosystems it supports.

We recently caught up with scholars from our 2021 cohort.

They're off and running -- to grad programs in the fall, summer research or policy internships, and continuing to grow as scholars and citizens of the world. We are tremendously proud of them. Check out our Scholars page for details!

How do corals adapt to warming oceans and avoid bleaching? Check out this really nice profile of coral research by graduate students from Rachael Bay's lab!

Rachel Vannette and members of her lab, including 2021 cohort member Michael Yu, used 16S sequencing to determine that the social carpenter bees Xylocopa sonorina and Xylocopa tabaniformis orpifex share microflora species in their crop and gut, but also host microbiomes that vary by species and geographic location. Further, their results suggest that the microbiomes of bee species with simple social groups can have characteristics typically associated with bees that have more complex social structures.

Our 2021 cohort of EERREC scholars created videos to translate their research for public.