Huge congrats to Jessica Zung for successfully defending her thesis on vertebrate odor space and the evolution of mosquito odor coding! We will be very sad to see her go.

Congratulations also to PhD candidate Vitor Dos Anjos for passing his generals exam! More exciting work to come!

Many milestones in the lab this spring. First up – congratulations to PhD candidate Tim Schwanitz for passing his generals exams. Exciting work to come!

Visiting scientist Enas Ghallab from Ain Shams University in Cairo treated the lab to an amazing, home-cooked, Ramadan dinner at the end of her 6 month stay. We will miss you Enas!

It was such a wonderful surprise to have so many current and former lab members together this week to celebrate my (still unofficial) tenure. You guys are the best. Sorry I screwed up the surprise and thank you for being so awesome!

An intense game of code names at Noah Rose’s going-away party. Noah will soon be starting his own lab at UC San Diego — Congratulations Noah!

Human-adapted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes not only bite humans but also breed in human-derived water containers like clay pots, metal drums, and discarded containers that collect rain water. Hillery’s new paper describing a novel hatching behavior that adapts these populations to the unique ecology of artificial water containers is finally out in The American Naturalist!

Noah’s new paper on Dating the origin and spread of human specialization in Aedes aegypti is out on bioRxiv!

Lab drinks (and watermelon) on the patio. #summer

Zhilei’s major PhD effort now out in Nature! With critical contributions from Jessica and former lab techs Alexis Kriete and Azwad Iqbal. Unlike the original bioRxiv preprint, the final study has wind tunnel data directly linking neural activity to host-seeking (thanks to collaborators Annika Hinze and Rickard Ignell).