Congratulations to Chelsea Sinclair for receiving the Charles H. Turner Award from the Animal Behavior Society! This award typically provides travel and accommodation to the ABS conference for undergraduate students, along with mentorship workshops and lunches. Because the ABS 2020 Meeting is being held virtually this year, Chelsea will attend the meeting remotely and participate in mentorship and professional development actives. Yay Chelsea!! (Update 7/29: Click here to see the ABS's profile of Chelsea on Twitter)

Today marks the 100th day that I've been maintaining our fruit fly populations at home. The garage lab has been upgraded with a new table, and I now cook fly food at home, so the flies and I are in a pretty good groove!

Congrats to Abigail Gutierrez and Ana-Maria Rodriguez Cuadrado on their graduation as part of the Barnard Class of 2020!
Abby earned her BA in Biology, and Ana-Maria earned her BA in Biology with an Anthropology minor. We can't wait until we can celebrate with them in person!

Congratulations to Ana-Maria and Abby for presenting their Guided Research & Seminar projects at the 2020 Biology Research Symposium. This year's Symposium was held over Zoom, where Ana-Maria and Abby were able to present their 1-minute oral abstracts and posters to the Barnard community!

Congratulations to Abigail Gutierrez who was awarded the Biology Department's Constance von Wahl Prize at the Barnard Honors Assembly over Zoom tonight! This prize is awarded to a graduating senior with high qualities of character and commitment to the department and her fellow students. Yay Abby!

COVID-19 might have moved us all off campus and moved our flies into my garage, but the Pischedda Lab is still meeting for semi-regular lab meetings! This week's agenda: watching Abby and Ana-Maria practice a run-through of their poster presentations for the upcoming Biology Symposium, and getting an updated lab photo (even if it needed to be via Zoom!)

With the lab effectively shut down, all of our students working remotely, and me working from home (~30 miles north of Barnard), I've had to use some interesting tactics to keep our fly populations alive. The fruit flies are now my new roommates, and I have set up a makeshift fly lab in my garage! Hopefully these efforts will be enough to keep these populations alive while we ride out what's to come. See below for how I'm trying to make this work!

This semester the Pischedda Lab added 3 new members to our group! Welcome to the team, Holly, Mariel and Olivia! 

Also, for anyone wondering how we get such great photos of our lab members, here is our unofficial lab photographer, Ana-Maria, making the magic happen!

My new paper with Michael Shahandeh and Tom Turner at UCSB has been published in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. In this paper, we map a male preference for female pheromones that differs between Drosophila species and find that a 1.35 Mb region on the X chromosome has a major effect on this preference.

The lab went out for lunch to celebrating the end of SRI: 10 weeks that have been filled with successes, failures, so much science, and so many flies!

Abby, Ana-Maria and Chelsea presented their summer research today at Barnard's Summer Research Institute (SRI) Poster Session!

Congratulations to Ana-Maria Rodriguez Cuadrado for being awarded the Con Edison Summer Internship to conduct her SRI research!