January 2025: Carissa’s preprint on immune priming in Rhodnius is up on bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.31.635857v1
January 2025: Sara Martin joins the lab as as a PhD student in Genetics
November 2024: Carissa Gilliland successfully defended her PhD. Way to go Dr. Gilliland! She will be moving to the University of California Riverside to work with Dr. Allison Hansen and Dr. Patrick Degnan.
August 2024: Quail Collins joins the lab as a PhD student in Entomology
August 2024: Dr. Loretta Mugo joined the lab to study colonization of R. prolixus by R. rhodnii. Dr. Mugo comes to us from France where she was PhD student in the EU’s Insect Doctors program under Professor Elisabeth Herniou.
July 2024: We moved to a new lab at UGA: Cedar St Building C Room 530H
June 2024: Kevin went out to Arizona to work with Dr. Eva Novakova and her lab collecting kissing bugs
March 2024: Both Ashley McCormick (MS) and Nia Keyes-Scott (PhD) successfully defended their theses – congratulations to both! Both Nia and Ashley are joining the US Military as entomology officers.
August 2023: Liam Ash joins the lab as a Master’s degree student. Welcome Liam!
July 2023: Nia and former undergraduates Kyle Swade and Lena Allen published their paper on orphan peptide receptors and reproduction in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes!
May 2023: Tanisha Moons, a PhD student from Eva Novakova’s lab at the University of South Bohemia, came to visit the lab for the summer as part of her research on kissing bug symbionts
March 2023: The lab received an NSF CAREER Award to continue our work on kissing bugs and their symbionts!
January 2023: Carrissa’s first first-author paper from her PhD research was published in Molecular Ecology! Former undergraduate Ashley McCormick and former postdoc Vilas Patel also were contributing authors on this manuscript.