Latest News

Jay Stachowicz' research recently was featured by the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences. Stachowicz is part of a global network that studies seagrasses and the organisms that live in coastal seagrass beds. They found that genetics influences on seagrasses dating back to Pleistocene glaciation have influenced the genetic diversity, size, and community structure of seagrasses even more than current conditions. 

For more information, see the full article. 

Popular Science just named Rachael Bay as one of the 2022 Brilliant 10. 

Woohoo, congratulations, Rachael!

Congratulations to Professor Rachael Bay and the Bay Lab denizens!

The Bay Lab recently received the 2022 Grand Prize for lab safety from UC Davis Safety Services. 

The EERREC program includes a science communication workshop, with a 3-minute video as capstone experience.

It's summertime!

Summer in Davis brings sunflowers in bloom and the arrival of the EERREC 2022 Cohort. They've gotten settled in campus housing, reacquainted themselves with bikes, and are becoming part of their lab and campus community.

Check out our Scholars page to learn more about them -- you can search using "2022" in the Position box. We'll add more info in the weeks to come.

Seagrasses form vast underwater meadows that provide habitat for countless other organisms and directly influence key ecosystem processes like carbon storage and erosion control.  But seagrasses are also under threat from human-caused changes in the environment such as warming temperature and cloudy water. Jay Stachowicz seeks to understand how genetic diversity within eelgrass, a seagrass found throughout the northern hemisphere, provides resilience to this species and the ecosystems it supports.

We recently caught up with scholars from our 2021 cohort.

They're off and running -- to grad programs in the fall, summer research or policy internships, and continuing to grow as scholars and citizens of the world. We are tremendously proud of them. Check out our Scholars page for details!

How do corals adapt to warming oceans and avoid bleaching? Check out this really nice profile of coral research by graduate students from Rachael Bay's lab!

Rachel Vannette and members of her lab, including 2021 cohort member Michael Yu, used 16S sequencing to determine that the social carpenter bees Xylocopa sonorina and Xylocopa tabaniformis orpifex share microflora species in their crop and gut, but also host microbiomes that vary by species and geographic location. Further, their results suggest that the microbiomes of bee species with simple social groups can have characteristics typically associated with bees that have more complex social structures.

Our 2021 cohort of EERREC scholars created videos to translate their research for public.

As a domesticated plant, maize has adapted to conditions in an environment shaped by humans. Thanks to its agricultural importance and longstanding genetic model, there is a wealth of data on both genotype and phenotype that can be used to understand how this adaptation occurred and is still occurring.

As crops have dispersed across the globe, they have had to adapt to a wide range of novel conditions. As climates change, crop plants will be forced to adapt or face local extinction.

Trina Miller, member of the 2021 EERREC Cohort, recently presented her CSU Fullerton SCERP honors research on marine debris in the rocky intertidal at a virtual event sponsored by the CSUF Office of Sustainability. Trina examines marine debris accumulation in San Pedro, CA, in three coastal areas with differing patterns of land use.

Ben Sacks uses genetic and genomic tools to conduct research that advances both the persistence of wild mammal biodiversity and our basic understanding of mammal evolution and ecology.

Rachael Bay, an EERREC trainer and faculty member in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, has been named a member of the 2021 Class of Packard Fellows!