December
A big congratulations to Dr Tori Reynolds – what an achievement! We all wish you well on your next big adventure as a postdoc at Emory University!
May
The year is well and truly underway, and productivity is pumping in the lab. The honours students are making a mad dash for the finish line, with thesis submission just a week away… Go guys, you can do it! A couple of our PhD researchers are also in their final months of write up, with words dripping from their fingertips. A few lab members have been out and about on some travels. Abigail and Isaac made a brief visit to WA a little while back, to follow up on a project established last year. Grace and Jess have been back to Tasmania, since the forests around their field sites finally stopped burning…! People are also gearing up to head overseas to meet with collaborators and attend conferences. And of course, the next Western Australian field season looms large, and prep is underway for kick off in a couple of months. Today we had a lab meeting and, for a change, we were just about all on campus. So we got a photo.
February
Congratulations to one of our summer students, Stan Earnshaw, who has just been awarded the prestigious Jiro Kikkawa Ecology Prize for 2018. This award is presented to the student with the highest average mark for 2nd year Ecology courses in the School of Biological Sciences,University of Queensland. Congratulations Stan! Stan has been working hard in the Mayfield lab this summer, maintaining an experiment exploring the effect of soil microbes on the growth of an invasive plant species, cape weed.