Insects are found from the tops of the highest mountains to the most northerly and southerly pieces of land on earth. Our goal is to understand how insects survive and thrive at the low temperatures they encounter in those habitats, and how they will be affected by a changing climate.  We address these questions at  levels of organisation from molecular biology to macroevolution and everything in between.  Check out out the research page to learn more.

Lab meetings and happenings...

Lab News...

April 2013 -Congratulations to Dr. Katie Marshall, who successfully defended her PhD thesis!

April 2013 -Brent Sinclair has been awarded a University Faculty Scholar award for 2013-2015.

April 2013 -Check out Heath MacMillan's beautiful fly image on the cover of this month's Naturwissenschaften (you can see it online, in tiny version, here)

April 2013 -Congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who has been awarded an NSERC PGS-D PhD scholarship, and Lauren Des Marteaux, who received an NSERC CGS-D.  Well done!

January 2013 -Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who won the Bruce Sidell award for the best student oral presentation in Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in San Francisco.  This was a big meeting (over 2000 abstracts), so is a huge achievement. Well done, Katie!

January 2013 -Brent Sinclair was interviewed on the CBC radio show 'Quirks and Quarks' about the lab's recent research on the metabolism of freezing frogs.  You can listen to the segment here, or read more about the work here or here, or access the article from the Journal of Experimental Biology here.

November 2012 -Congratulations to Hiroko Udaka, who received an Honourable Mention in the 3 minute research competition at the Western Postdoctoral Forum.

November 2012 -Congratulations to Evelyn Boychuk, who passed her MSc thesis defense!

November 2012 -Congratulations to Heath MacMillan, who has a paper explaining chill coma published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  You can read the article here, and a press release, complete with pictures and a movie, here.  This work has been featured on phys.org and Science Daily, Nature World News, seacoast online, The Gazette, Heath was on the front page of the London Free Press (above the fold!) and (my personal favourite) cricket-breeding.com.

November 2012 -Congratulations to Litza Coello who passed her MSc thesis defense with flying colours!

October 2012 -Our very own Katie Marshall does her bit regularly to popularise science. Check out her physiology-related blog posts on teh ESC blog site here, and her 'Outside JEB' pieces for Journal of Experimental Biology here, here, and here.

September 2012 -Wondering what Brent is doing on sabbatical? Check out his blog post on the Entomological Society of Canada website here.

September 2012 -Welcome to Laura Ferguson, a new PhD student working on cold and eco-immunology.  Laura joins us from Acadia University.  Welcome also to Dr. Annegret Nicolai, who joins us from France on a Canadian Government Fellowship to freeze snails!

August 2012 -Congratulations to Katie Marshall, who received the Ruth Horner Arnold Award from the Department of Biology.

August 2012 -Brent Sinclair is on sabbatical for the 2012-2013 academic year.  He'll be mainly in New Zealand from August 2012 to April 2013, so may be a bit slow to reply to emails.

June 2012 -Congratulations to Golnaz Salehipour, who passed her proposal assessment.

June 2012 - Brent Sinclair has been awarded the C. Gordon Hewitt Award by the Entomological Society of Canada.  You can read an interview about the award here, and more about Hewitt here.

April 2012 - Congratulations to Justin Saindon, who successfully defended his MSc thesis.  Justin's recently started as an analyst with UHN in Toronto.

April 2012 - Farewell to Matt Clarke and Sarah Lake, our departing honours students.  Both did great work and I'm sure will be names to watch.  Good luck!

April 2012 - Brent Sinclair and Alice Dennis were recently interviewed on Radio New Zealand National's 'Our changing World' about the evolution of cold tolerance in stick insects. You can download the .mp3 here.  

April 2012 - Caroline Williams' work on overwintering Duskywings is out in PLoS ONE.  You can read the press release here, and about butterflies losing their mojo in the London Free Press and Science Daily.

March 2012 - Congratulations to Sarah Lake, who won the best presentation award in the 'Health and Physiology' stream at Ontario Biology Day, and was also voted best speaker in her room at the Department's Honours presentation day.

February 2012 - Brent Sinclair was recently interviewed in Biotechniques about a recent paper on Drosophila cryopreservation.