October 2011 - Check out this Blog post about Katie Marshall's recent paper in Journal of Experimental Biology.

September 2011 - Farewell to Ruth - thanks for your help! and welcome to our two new honours students, Sarah Lake and Matt Clarke (who is co-supervised by Graham Thompson).

August 2011 - Welcome to Ruth Jakobs, who joins us for a couple of months from Germany on a DAAD RISE fellowship.

June 2011 - Congratulations to Evelyn Boychuk, who passed her MSc proposal assessment with flying colours.  Well done, Evelyn!

May 2011 - Jessie MacAlpine has done it again - she won Gold at the Canada-wide science fair, an award for her use of statistics, and has landed herself a trip to Australia next winter.  Awesome stuff!

May 2011 - Congratulations to Caroline Williams, who has been awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.  These scholarships are extremely competitive for international students.  Well done, Caroline!

April 2011 - Congratulations to Caroline Williams, who has been awarded the Epcor Water CSZ travel award based on the quality of science presented in her abstract for the upcoming Canadian Society of Zoologists meeting in Ottawa.

April 2011 - Congratulations to Evelyn Boychuk, who has been awarded a mini-grant to do summer research at the University of California's White Mountains Research Station.

April 2011 - Farewell to our graduating honours students.  David Bing is off to to a MSc with Thomas Merritt at Laurentian, while Victoria Ransberry will be doing her MSc with Grant McClelland at McMaster.  Good luck to both of them!

April 2011 - Congratulations to Heath MacMillan, who passed his PhD Comprehensive exam with distinction.  

April 2011 - Congratulations to Jessie MacAlpine - the Sinclair lab's adjunct high school student.  Jessie won a gold medal at the London District Science Fair, and is on her way to the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Toronto.  Good luck, Jessie!  Jessie also won the commercialisation potential award at the London Regional Sanofi-Avenitis Biotalent Challenge.

March 2011 - Former student Jill Crosthwaite featured, in full safety gear, in an article about our cold toelrance work on Emerald Ash Borer that was published in the Sault Star.

March 2011 - Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who has been awarded an NSERC PGS-D graduate scholarship.

March 2011 - Brent Sinclair and Litza Coello have returned from a 2 week trip to New Zealand where they were engaged in stick insect collecting with Team Sticky members Thomas Buckley, Alice Dennis and Mhairi McFarlane.

February 2011 - Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who won a Faculty of Science Graduate Thesis Research Award.

February 2011 - Congratulations to Litza Coello, who passed her MSc proposal assessment with flying colours.

January 2011 - Welcome to Evelyn Boychuk, who joins us from the University of Calgary to begin an MSc on overwintering in willow leaf beetles.

January 2011 - Congratulations to Caroline Williams, who was awarded the Ruth Horner Arnold Graduate scholarship by the Department of Biology.

December 2010 - Congratulations to Jane Zhang, who successfully defended her MSc thesis on gene expression in Drosophila.  Jane is now heading off to start a PhD at McGill.

October 2010 - Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who won the President's prize for the best oral presentation at the Entomological Society of Ontario meeting in Grand Bend.

November 2010 - Congratulations (again!) to Katie Marshall, who has been awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology, and to Heath MacMillan who will be buying the drinks after his NSERC PGS-D was upgraded to a Canada Graduate Scholarship.

September 2010 - Welcome to Dr. Hiroko Udaka, who is joining the lab for a year on a postdoc fellowship funded by the Canadian government.  Hiroko joins us from Osaka City University, where she was working as an instructor, and had previously completed a PhD on cold tolerance of Slugs with Dr. Hideharu Numata.  Hiroko and will be freezing insects while she's here.

September 2010 - Welcome to our new crop of research students:  Litza Coello, a native of Honduras, is joining us from Mike Elnitsky's lab at Mercyhurst to do an MSc; David Bing and Wesley Chick are still in the lab, now doing honours thesis projects, and Victoria Ransberry joins the lab from a year in industry to begin her honours project.

August 2010 - We are all very proud of Caroline Williams, who won the American Physiological Society's Scholander Award (the top award for a trainee in comparative and evolutionary physiology) and best oral presentation at the American Physiological Society meeting in Westminster, Colorado.  In winning the award, Caroline beat out student and post-doc finalists from Harvard, Stanford and UBC.  Way to go, Caroline!  Also at the APS meeting, Katie Marshall won a student travel award.

July 2010 - Congratulations to Jill Crosthwaite who successfully defended her MSc thesis on emerald ash borer cold tolerance.

May 2010 - Congratulations to Jessie MacAlpine, our very own Grade 9 student, whose project on the effects of carbon dioxide and chronic cold on the reproductive output of Drosophila  won her a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Peterborough, ON.

May 2010 - The lab had a good showing, with five presentations and the Boutilier Award lecture at the Canadian Society of Zoologists meeting in Vancouver.  Thanks to the UBC organisers for an excellent conference.

May 2010 - Congratulations to Caroline Williams, who won the Faculty of Science Graduate Student Teaching Award.

May 2010 - Farewell to Tony Renda and Aimee Bazinet, who have finished their honours theses.  Tony is off for a summer in the "reforestation industry" before heading to grad school out west.  Aimee will be joining us for a month to pass her skills on, before seeking her fortune in the world of "employment outside academia".  Welcome to Celina Lin, a Faculty of Science Learning Development Undergraduate Fellow and welcome back to Richard Sove and Joseph Stinziano, who will be NSERC USRA summer students this summer.  Celina is developing material for a new lab course, while Joseph and Richard will be doing research on the plasticity of desiccation tolerance in Drosophila.

April 2010 - Congratulations to Heath MacMillan, who has been awarded an NSERC postgraduate scholarship, and Caroline Williams who has been awarded the Robert and Ruth Lumsden Graduate Fellowship.  

March 2010 - Katie Marshall appeared in Ontario Green in December talking about the importance of insects for bird populations.

February 2010 - Congratulations to Heath MacMillan who successfully transferred into the PhD programme after defending his proposal.  Heath will be cosupervised by Jim Staples for his PhD, which will hopefully be quite biochemical.

February 2010 - Be careful out there!  The lab welcomes back Justin, who had an inadvertant interaction with the ice while skating (nice black eye!), and Katie, who demonstrated how not to ride a bicycle in winter (well-broken leg).  We're glad both are in good spirits, and wish a speedy recovery!

January 2010 - Welcome  to Casper Nyamukondiwa and Leigh Boardman, who are visiting us until June as exchange students.  Casper will be working with Drosophila and Leigh will be looking at woolly bears.  They both join us from John Terblanche's lab at the University of Stellenbosch.

January 2010 - Welcome to new MSc student Justin Saindon.  Justin joins us from the University of Ottawa and will be working on artificial selection in Drosophila.

January 2010 - Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who passed her PhD comprehensive exam in style, which may be unsurprising, since she let her IQ hang out as a member of the Atheist team on CBC TV's Test the Nation.

January 2010 - Brent Sinclair will receive the 2010 Boutilier Award for new investigators (and give the associated lecture) at the Canadian Society of Zoologists meeting in Vancouver in May.  You can read more about the meeting here.

December 2009 - Our research using synchrotron x-rays to watch the process of ice formation in maggots has been published in the open access journal PLoS ONE.  You can read the article (and download several movies) here, read about it on Western News here, or the Argonne website, PhysOrg, Science Daily, DNA (India) or RSI (Switzerland), KeSimpulan (Indonesia), or see one of the movies on YouTube.

November 2009 - Katie Marshall is in the news for her excellent paper about the fitness consequences of repeated cold exposure in Drosophila melanogaster.  The paper was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  You can access the article here, and read the news story on the uwo news site here, on PhysOrg, in the London Free Press, in Exchange Magazine, and (oddly) in Chemical and Engineering News.

October 2009 - Thomas Buckley (PI, Landcare Research New Zealand) together with Melody Clark (British Antarctic Survey) and Brent Sinclair has been awarded a prestigious Marsden Fund grant by the Royal Society of New Zealand to conduct research on the evolution of cold tolerance in New Zealand alpine stick insects.  

September 2009 - Welcome to Aimee Bazinet and Tony Renda, who are starting their honours theses in the lab, and Martin Vezer, who is doing 'science experience' as part of his PhD studies in the Philosophy of Climate Change research.  Welcome (welcome back for some) to our new crop of work study students and volunteers (check them out on the people page).  And welcome back to Caroline Williams, who returns form maternity leave with young Liana in tow.

August 2009 - Farewell to lab stalwart, fly wrangler and interstellar warrior Diana Balmer who is off to see something of the world.  We understand her first stop is Australia.

August 2009 - Conferences... Stephi Sobek has returned form presenting some of her work at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in New Mexico, while Brent Sinclair is back from the ISEPEP3 meeting in Tsukuba, Japan.  At the meeting, it was decided that the Sinclair lab will host ISEPEP5 in 2013 in London, Ontario!  While in Japan, Brent also presented a seminar at the Institute for Low Temperature Science in Sapporo.  

July 2009 - Reaching out... The lab has been involved in three outreach events this month: We hosted 20+ secondary school students for an afternoon as part of UWO's Indigenous Services Health Sciences min-University; We entertained 38 6-12 year olds who visited us to learn about insects as part of a bug-themed week at a City of London summer day camp and Brent Sinclair travelled up to Manitoulin Island to participate in Camp P'Skapkiidaa, a science-based camp for First Nations students from Southwestern Ontario.

June 2009 - It's all about Caroline Williams this month.  First, congratulations on the birth of her daughter, Liana Maelis on June 26th.  Second, a paper to be published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on which Caroline was a co-author, was the topic of a news report on Western news.  You can read about it here, and look at the paper here.

May 2009 - Congratulations to Lauren Strachan, who successfully defended her Master's thesis on the evolution of cold tolerance in Drosophila! Farewell and good luck!

May 2009 - Congratulations and farewell to former lab members Jillian Walsh, who got into the Schulich school of Medicine at Western, Sourabh Arora (McMaster Medical School) and Erfan Vafaie, who heads to Simon Fraser University to begin a Master's in Pest Management.  Good luck!

May 2009 - Caroline Williams was in the news... see a slide show about our collaboration with the Hellmann lab at Notre Dame working on butterflies in British Columbia here.

April/May 2009 - Brent Sinclair was away on a trip to sub-Antarctic Marion Island (see location on google maps here).  You can see some pictures from the trip here.  Brent is available to non-profit community groups and schools to talk about his experiences - email him.

April 2009 - Well done to Caroline Williams, who passed her PhD Comprehensive Examination!

March 2009 - Well Done to Jill Crosthwaite and Heath MacMillan, who passed their MSc proposal assessments, and Katie Marshall, who successfully passed her MSc-to-PhD transition assessment.

January 2009 - Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who won not one, but two poster prizes at the recent SICB meeting.  Katie won the best student poster award from the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, as well as the Adrian M. Wenner Strong Inference award for the student presentation that best used a multiple working hypothesis approach.  You can see a low-res jpeg of her poster here.

January 2009 - Welcome to Jian (Jane) Zhang, who has arrived from China to begin an MSc project on Springtails. and to Chelsie Warshafsky, who has officially started her 4th year 'mini-thesis' project.

January 2009 - The lab expedition to SICB was a success.  We presented a talk and 5 posters at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Boston.  We also met up with cold tolerance people from all over North America - you can see pictures here.

October 2008 - Congratulations to the lab, who won the annual departmental halloween costume competition (see the people page for a picture of the 'Mendel and his peas' ensemble); and were equal runners-up in the pumpkin carving competition.

October 2008 - Well done to Caroline Williams, who passed her PhD proposal assessment examination.

September 2008 - Farewell to Dr. Arun Rajamohan, who finished at the end of the month.  Arun has been a data machine since the inception of the lab, and his technical expertise and wry humour will be sorely missed.  Arun leaves us for a position in North Dakota where he will be freezing tropical flies.  Good luck Arun!

September 2008 - Welcome to Dr. Stephanie Sobek, who begins officially on October 1st as postdoc on the Emerald Ash Borer project.  Stephanie joins us from the University of Göttingen in Germany.

June 2008 - In the News! The Emerald Ash Borer project was featured in the media.  You can see a video about it on the London Free Press Website, and read more about the story on the Western website.

June 2008 - In the News!  Caroline Williams recently achieved fame as the cover girl on the uwo website in a story covering her fieldwork in Southwestern Ontario.  There will be occasional opportunities for volunteers who are UWO students to participate in fieldwork with Caroline catching Southwestern Ontario Butterflies over the summer.  See here for details.