Deepa Agashe's Lab at NCBS, Bangalore
Towards the end of this year, long-term lab members left for new adventures; coincidentally both going to Germany! Mrudula is starting as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne, and Parth is jumping into a PhD program at the University of Dusseldorf. We’ll miss them both, and are glad that we at least managed to get together for a distanced goodbye outdoors.
Rittik was chosen as a runner-up for the first set of Ben Barres Spotlight awards, and will receive research funds. Rittik will use the funds to determine the molecular basis of assortative mating in laboratory-evolved populations of flour beetles.
Congratulations, Rittik!
We are off to various conferences this year. Come listen to our talks, visit our posters, and talk science!
Aparna is already at Evolution 2019, to talk about the role of microbiomes during host adaptation in the Hamilton Award Symposium. We are rather proud that Aparna was selected to present as a finalist! She will also present a poster, and speak at the Story Collider event, Outside the Distribution. Do go talk to her!
In early July I will be at the Gordon Research Conference for Microbial Population Biology at Andover, NH, USA, presenting a poster on our beetle microbiome work. I’m super excited about this meeting, which is a great collection of microbially inclined folks.
Around the same time, Laasya will present a poster on her mistranslation work, at the EMBO|EMBL symposium on New approaches and concepts in microbiology in Heidelberg, Germany.
At the end of July, Parth and I will head to SMBE 2019 in Manchester, UK, presenting posters on the evolution and importance of translation and mistranslation, respectively. I am also organizing a symposium on the Causes of Parallel Molecular Evolution with Alex Couce. Come visit our posters, and listen to the amazing speakers in our symposium!
In August, Vrinda will be in Turku, Finland, speaking at ESEB 2019 about the population dynamics of laboratory-evolved beetles in new habitats. She has really fun data, so do check out her talk!
And finally, in the last week of August Laasya will present a poster and a talk at the FEMS summer school for postdocs: Bacterial robustness and mechanisms of death, in Split, Croatia.
Dr. Sane defending her PhD cake
Gaurav pointing out his successful exit after defending his PhD thesis (mural at the Sastra University’s Anusandhan Kendra).
We have another fun summer conference season lined up this year; as usual, most lab members have received travel awards. Come hear about our work if you happen to be at these meetings!
Mrudula, Kruttika, Laasya, Saurabh, Joshua and I will be at the SMBE meeting in Yokohama, Japan, starting 8 July. We’re all super excited that Mrudula was chosen as a Fitch award finalist this year, with the added perk that SMBE will cover her trip. Kruttika also has a registration award from SMBE, and an Infosys travel award from NCBS. This should be an especially fun meeting as we celebrate 50 years of the Neutral Theory of molecular evolution.
Around July end, Pratibha will attend her first international meeting abroad: the Gordon Research Conference and seminar on C1 metabolism in Maine, USA. She will be supported by a travel award from the Dept of Science and Technology (DST, India).
Finally, at the end of August, Mrudula and Vrinda will join me at the 2nd Joint Evolution meeting in Montpellier, France. They both have travel grants from the SSE. This promises to be a crazy gathering of evolutionary biologists and we’re looking forward to it!
