New discovery-based research curriculum for biological sciences launching at UH Mānoa

I (Floyd Reed) along with Megan Porter, Becky Chong, and Stuart Donachie are involved with an HHMI sponsored SEA-PHAGES program of undergraduate virus discovery and characterization in the classroom. This is something I have been interested in for several years now and it is exciting that we are finally able to bring it to the biology program here at UH.

Maya Shaulsky has been working on a joint Thomson-Reed lab project with T7 coliphage. Recently she gave a presentation in the Undergraduate Showcase for undergraduate research here at UH Mānoa.

And, Maya graduated! She is now busy wrapping things up in the lab.

Michael Wallstrom gave the final EECB presentation of the semester on May 4th. He talked about some work he is planning to do to study near shore species diversity. Since it was on May the Fourth he did the presentation with a Star Wars theme complete with the initial sloped text animation moving off into a starfield (I wish I had a picture of that). In the photo he is on a slide where he talks about the economics of the Coastal Empire—the rebel base is here in Hawaiʻi.

Update: He gave his talk again and I snapped a shot of the introductory text animation.

The big news in the lab recently is that Áki Láruson defended his Ph.D. dissertation "Genomics of the globally distributed echinoid genus Tripneustes".

From left to right in the lab photo taken right after his defense is me (Floyd Reed), Michael Wallstrom, Áki Láruson, and Maria Costantini. People outside of Hawaiʻi might be surprised by all the things around Áki's neck. Here it is customary to give a Lei to someone after a big event and if several people give you Leis they can pile up as in this example. Note that at least two of the Lei's have a sea urchin theme.

Áki's graduation ceremony is on May 12th. He plans to stay in Hawaiʻi over the summer finishing up analysis of exon capture data. He then has an NSF funded postdoc at Northeastern's Marine Science Center in Boston starting this fall.