April 2018 - Congratulations to this year's wonderful crop of honours students, who have finished up and moved on. We'll miss you guys! Brynne, Lamees, and Joanne are going on to MSc study, while Aisa is going to catch All The Bumble Bees and save the world first. Look out for Lamees' new lab logo design (coming soon to a website near you). We'll miss you all!

January 2018 - Farewell to Mozhgan, who is on her way back to Iran after a very productive visit!

January 2018 - Congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who will receive the T.W.M. Cameron award for best PhD thesis from the Canadian Society of Zoologists in May!

January 2018 - Congratulations to Kurtis Turnbull, who has been awarded a JEB travelling fellowship to do research in New Zealand.

December 2017 - Farewell to Tomáš Štětina, who returns to Czech Republic after a productive visit.

December 2017 - Congratulations to Lab Alumna Caroline Williams, who will receive the Bartholomew award for new investigators at SICB in January!

October 2017 - Congratulations to Kurtis Turnbull who is now a PhD student after passing his MSc->PhD assessment with flying colours!

October 2017 - Congratulations to Kurtis Turnbull, who won the President's prize for best student poster at the Entomological Society of Ontario meeting in Guelph, ON.

September 2017 - Welcome to Tomáš Štětina who joins us from the University of South Bohemia for a few months (we swapped him for Jackie!). 

August 2017 - Welcome to a new crop of people! Mozhgan Mohammadzadeh joins us for six months from Iran. Also, Lamees Mohammad has transmogrified from an intern into an Honours thesis student, and is joined in that role by Brynne Duffy, Aisa Kuper-Psenicnik, and Joanne Tang. 

July 2017 - Congratulations to Jackie Lebenzon, who is now a PhD Candidate, having passed her comprehensive exam! Jackie is now off to Czech Republic for three months to visit the awesome Koštál lab.

July 2017 - We are recruiting domestic graduate students to start in 2018. Check out the Vacancies page for information.

June 2017 - The Sinclair lab is looking for newbies! We're recruiting graduate students (currently Canadian or Canadian PR) with an interest in insects, physiology and molecular biology to explore the cellular and molecular basis of freeze tolerance and cold survival.

May 2017 - Welcome to Dr. Alex Torson, who joins us from North Dakota State University as a Postdoc on the ALB project.

May 2017 - Congratulations to Jackie Lebenzon, who won the Helen Battle Prize for Best Student Poster at the Canadian Society of Zoologists' Annual Meeting in Winnipeg, MB.  Congratulations also to lab alumnus Heath MacMillan, who won the Presidents' Prize for Best Postdoc Presentation at the same meeting.

May 2017 - Lots of new (and repeat) faces in the Sinclair lab this month. Welcome to Adam Smith, who will be an intern on the ALB project in London, and Meng Lei Zhang, who will be performing the same role in Sault Ste Marie.  Welcome also to Peter Denezis, who joins us for the summer as an NSERC USRA, and welcome back to Yanira Jiménez Padilla, who is now officially a PhD student!

April 2017 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus and Jackie Lebenzon, who both received Ontario Graduate Scholarships for the next year of their PhD work.

April 2017 - Many congratulations to Dr. Lauren Des Marteaux, who defended her PhD on ion and water balance in the cold (or... 'everything you wanted to know about cricket rectums but were afraid to ask') - you can download and read her thesis here. She'll be heading to the Czech Republic for a postdoc in May, and we miss her already.

April 2017 - Congratulations to John Ciancio who passed his MSc Proposal Assessment.

February 2017 -  Congratulations to Dr. Laura Ferguson, who successfully defended her PhD thesis on the Ecoimmunology of overwintering insects! You can read her awesome thesis here.

January 2017 - Welcome to Lamees Mohammad, who will be joining us as an intern on the Asian Longhorned Beetle project until the end of August.

December 2016 - Congratulations to Yanira Jiménez Padilla, a newly-minted Mastress of Science, after defending her MSc Thesis on yeast effects on Drosophila melanogaster development and cold tolerance!

October 2016 - Farewell to Xinjian Xu, who heads back to Fuzhou (and his bees!)

September 2016 - Susan Anthony's Pseudoscorpion work hit the headlines again, this time on BBC Earth!

September 2016 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus (Malcolm Ferguson Award) and Lauren Des Marteaux (Irene Uchida Award) for their success in the Department of Biology's Donor awards competition.

August 2016 - The Sinclair lab is looking for a postdoc with finely-honed skills in functional genomics to study cold tolerance and diapause in Asian Long-horned Beetle.  Click here for details. Application deadline is October 3 2016.

July 2016 - Congratulations to Jackie Lebenzon, who passed her MSc-to-PhD proposal assessment and is now a bona fide PhD student. We're happy to be stuck with you, Jackie!

July 2016 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus, who is now a PhD candidate, after passing her comprehensive exam.

June 2016 - Our recent paper on Drosophila acclimation featuring an all-star cast of Sinclair lab alumni received quite a bit of media attention.  You can read the open access paper here, and catch up with various media reports here, here, and here.

June 2016 - Congratulations to Susan Anthony, who has advanced to candidacy after passing her PhD Comprehensive exam!  Now it's Greenland-ho for Susan.

May 2016 - Congratulations to Kurtis Turnbull, who won the Holeton Prize for the best student poster in Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry at the Canadian Society of Zoologists' annual meeting, here in London.  Kurtis and Jantina Toxopeus were also finalists in the society-wide Battle Prize for best poster (Jantina got an honorary mention).  Also at CSZ, Laura Ferguson and Lauren Des Marteaux were two of six finalists in the society-wide Hoar award for best student presentation, with Lauren a very close runner-up.

May 2016 - Congratulations to Susan Anthony, Jackie Lebenzon, and Kurtis Turnbull, all of whom landed NSERC scholarships! Without tooting the Sinclair lab horn too much, this is 100% of the new NSERC scholarships in Biology this year - way to go!

May 2016 - We are delighted to welcome Jantina Toxopeus back from her visit to Czech Republic and Laura Ferguson back from maternity leave!

March 2016 - Congratulations to Kurtis Turnbull, who passed his proposal assessment with flying colours.

February 2016 - Susan Anthony and Jackie Lebenzon featured their research (and Susan's dog) in 'Humans of Western'

December 2015 - Brent Sinclair was in the news, as CBC featured the Sinclair lab's work on insect freeze tolerance

December 2015 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus, who has received an NSERC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, and will be spending the first part of 2016 in Vlad Koštál's lab in the Czech Republic.

November 2015 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus and Susan Anthony for passing their PhD proposal assessments with flying colours!

November 2015 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who won the President's Prize for best student presentation at the Entomological Society of Canada meeting in Montreal... even though she was erroneously placed in the Biocontrol section!

October 2015 - Welcome to Dr. Xinjian Xu, who joins us for a year from Fuzhou University in China.  Xinjian will be working on heat tolerance in Drosophila.

September 2015 - Welcome to Dr. Sirpa Kaunisto, joining us as a Marie Curie Postdoc from the University of Eastern Finland and to Kurtis Turnbull, a new MSc student joining us from Shelley Adamo's lab at Dalhousie.

August 2015 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus (Ruth Horner Arnold Award) and Laura Ferguson (Malcolm Ferguson Award - presumably no relation!), who won some of Biology's annual Donor awards for graduate student research excellence.

July 2015 - Congratulations to Yanira, who did a fantastic job in her proposal assessment!

July 2015 - Congratulations to Alexander McKinnon for his successful MSc thesis defense!  Zander now heads back to the prairies where he'll attend medical school at the University of Manitoba.

June 2015 - Congratulations to Jackie Lebenzon, who passed her MSc proposal assessment with flying colours!

May 2015 - The Sinclair lab made a good showing at CSZ, with both Jantina Toxopeus and Jackie Lebenzon in the Battle award finals (for best student poster), Laura Ferguson having a strong presence as Student Councillor and lab alum Evelyn Boychuk winning the CSZ Public Awareness award, for her article on Monarchs in the Globe and Mail (you can read it here).

May 2015 - Welcome to Dariusz Małek, a PhD student joining us for a month from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

April 2015 -  Congratulations to Susan Anthony, who received a substantial grant from the Northern Scientific Training Programme to support her forthcoming fieldwork in the Yukon.

April 2015 - They're tongue-in-cheek, but we'll take the awards we get.  Congratulations to the lab, who cleaned up at the Biology Grad Students BioBall awards... As well as being voted the lab that was "fun and produces the most data", Zander was "most likely to make you drink beer at the grad club" and "best villain", Laura was "most supportive" and gave the best Thursday Physiologicals talk (that's two in a row for Laura), and the "Cold Truths" review, by Brent, along with Hugh Henry, and Sinclair Lab alumna Caroline Williams was voted "best review in the past three years".

April 2015 - Congratulations to Jantina Toxopeus, who received a research grant from the Orthopterists' society to support one of her many side projects - this one on freeze tolerance in great grigs.

March 2015 - Brent has been involved with the Sustainable Canada Dialogues.  Over the past 10 months, we have put together a proposed path to transition Canada to a low carbon economy.  You can download the document here, and read an interview with Brent here.

February 2015 - The Sinclair Lab's work was featured by Business Insider.  Check out the article here.

January 2015 - Congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who won the best student presentation award in the Division of Ecoimmunology and Disease Ecology at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida.

January 2015 - Welcome to our new MSc students, Yanira Jiminez Padilla and (making a welcome return) Jackie Lebenzon.

December 2014 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who passed her comprehensive exam (up against an all-star cast of entomologists and physiologists).  Well done!

December 2014 - Congratulations to Ruth Jakobs, who successfully defended her MSc thesis.  Ruth's been around for a long time, and it's amazing to think that that little undergrad intern is now ... a little MSc graduate! You can read her thesis here.

October 2014 - Congratulations to Sinclair Lab Alumni Katie Marshall and Heath MacMillan, who were among the nine finalists for the Scholander award at the American Physiological Society in San Diego.  Heath was Runner-up, well done!

October 2014 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who won the President's poster prize at the Entomological Society of Ontario Annual Meeting, and Alexander McKinnon, who was runner-up in the President's oral presentation awards at the same meeting.

September 2014 - Welcome to new PhD students Susan Anthony and Jantina Toxopeus, and to new honours student Mike Brown and new mini-thesis student Angelina Artemenko.  Farewell to Phuong Huynh, who is heading back to Vietnam after a MITACS Globalink internship.

August 2014 - Congratulations to PhD candidate Laura Ferguson who passed her comprehensive exam!

June 2014 - Congratulations to Alexander McKinnon, who has been awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

May 2014 - Many congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who won the CSZ Battle award for best student poster at the Genomes to Biomes meeting in Montreal.

May 2014 - Congratulations to Sinclair-lab-member-to-be Jantina Toxopeus on receiving a Company of Biologists Traveling Fellowship for forthcoming work in Siberia.

May 2014 - Welcome to Nick Chornenki and welcome back to David Li, our NSERC USRA students for the summer.

April 2014 - Sinclair lab work has been in the news.  Former PhD student Katie Marshall discovered a new kind of fat in flies.  The paper is in Journal of Experimental Biology, who did a nice write-up about it here.  It also features in a story on LiveScience, was in the London Free Press and in Science Borealis. You can listen to Katie's Quirks & Quarks interview here.

April 2014 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who passed her PhD proposal assessment!

April 2014 - Congratulations to Jackie Lebenzon, who was the joint winner of the best Physiology & Biochemistry presentation at the Biology Honours day!

April 2014 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who received a Departmental travel award to attend the APS Comparative meeting in San Diego.  At the recent Biology Formal, Laura Ferguson's talk was voted the best of the Thursday Physiologicals, and Ruth Jakobs was recognised by her peers as the hardest working grad student in the department (but we knew that already!).

March 2014 - A special farewell to Dr. Hiroko Udaka, who is leaving us after nearly four years for a faculty position at Kyoto University in Japan.  We'll miss you, Hiroko!

March 2014 - Farewell to Lindsay Crawford and Fengliang Jin.

March 2014 - Click here to download the Sinclair lab infographic!

February 2014 - Welcome to Banafsheh Ahmadi, who will be visiting form Iran for six months, and welcome back to Litza Coello, who is working for a few months on a short term contract with CFIA.

January 2014 - Welcome to Lindsay Crawford, who will be working with us as a technician for a few months.

January 2014 - Congratulations to Hiroko Udaka, who has landed a faculty position at the elite Kyoto University!!

December 2013 - Congratulations to Golnaz Salehipour, who successfully defended her MSc thesis! You can download and read it here.

November 2013 - Congratulations to lab alumna Stephi Sobek-Swant, who has been appointed Executive Director of the RARE charitable research reserve!

November 2013 - Congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who passed her PhD proposal with flying colours!

October 2013 - Congratulations to recent graduates: Katie Marshall was awarded the John W. Arnold Fellowship for the best Western PhD thesis in Zoology, and Heath MacMillan was awarded the J.D. Detwiler Award for the most outstanding Biology PhD thesis overall.  We're all very proud back here!

October 2013 - A very big farewell to Annegret Nicolai, who returned to France this month.  We'll miss you, Annegret, but your gastropodal influence will continue!  Farewell also to Tanya Dann, who is now winging her way back to New Zealand the long way.

October 2013 - Congratulations to Lauren Des Marteaux, who has been elected as the student representative on the Entomological Society of Ontario board of directors.

September 2013 - Welcome to Alexander McKinnon, who is starting an MSc on freeze tolerance in insects, Qian Long, who begins a PhD on evolutionary physiology of snails, and Jackie Lebenzon and Matt Spilka, who are starting their honours projects.

August 2013 - Farewell to Katharina Nikolaev, who has been visiting for a few weeks on a DAAD-RISE fellowship.  And welcome to Tanya Dann, a PhD student visiting from University of Otago for a few months and Fengliang Jin, who joins us from China for a year as a postdoc.

August 2013 - Congratulations to Laura Ferguson, who has been awarded the Ruth Horner Arnold Graduate Fellowship.

August 2013 - Congratulations to Dr. Heath MacMillan, who defended his PhD thesis in style. After ISEPEP5, Heath is off to Aarhus to postdoc with Johannes Overgaard. You can download Heath's thesis here.

July 2013 - Congratulations to Ruth Jakobs, who successfully defended her MSc thesis proposal!

...time passes...

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 the 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 -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.

January 2012 - Brent Sinclair was recently mentioned in an article in the Toronto Star about the weird winter we are currently experiencing, and in an article in Western News about the biotron.

January 2012 - Welcome to Golnaz Salehipour, who joins us to begin an MSc (and hopefully eventually a PhD) about immune responses to cold in Drosophila, and to Julia Ahn, who will be doing an independent study project on localising cold-related gene expression.

January 2012 - Congratulations to Dr. Hiroko Udaka, who was awarded a prestigious JSPS fellowship and will continue her postdoctoral work in the Sinclair lab for another two years.

December 2011 - Congratulations  to Dr. Caroline Williams who successfuly defended her PhD thesis (which you can download here)!  Caroline will be beginning a postdoc in Dan Hahn's lab at University of Florida in January 2012.

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.