The starting up of the lab with a full set of grad and undergrad students has made quite the busy year. I also taught my first course, Ethological Mechanisms (ZOOL 370), which spoke for much of my Winter semester in 2023.

That all being said, in the middle of a weather-confused summer seems like as great a time as ever to celebrate some of the wonderful things to come out of the lab.

FALL SEMESTER 2022

A wonderful highlight of our last semester of 2022 was a second-year thesis student, Olivia, joining our lab for a BIOL 298 project. Olivia was a great addition to the lab and worked hard to uncover some interesting impacts of embryonic development of the peripheral nervous system. She capped off the semester with a great poster as part of the BIOL 298 class.

 

WINTER SEMESTER 2023

As mentioned above, I taught my first course at UofA this semester. It was a lot of fun and made easier by the fantastic topics I got to teach (the neurobiology and physiology of predatory and prey behaviours in a huge variety of animals) and a great class of students.

Outside of the classroom, The Department of Biological Sciences held its annual celebration of student work, the R.E. Peter Conference. Several students attended, including Kayla with her fantastic poster on FPW run-off and zebrafish development. Also:

Gabriel presented in one of the poster sessions with an outline of his ongoing work addressing the development of peripheral sensory neurons in zebrafish. Since this presentation, his work has taken leaps and bounds, culminating in an impressive amount of data and promising future paths.

And masters student, Shelby, delivered a presentation on her dual-approach paradigms to studying neural input that may drive developmental neurogenesis. Most impressively, Shelby was awarded best Masters talk of the conference!

 

SUMMER 2023

As things have been ramping up over the summer, I thought it best to post about how we started it. The whole lab (missing Shelby who was very tragically under the weather) went to a board game cafe. This meeting doubled as a farewell to Parya, who has been an undergrad researcher in the lab since we began and is off to pursue medical school. We will miss her!