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!

Congrats to Lisa, Nushrat and Taylor on their graduation as part of the Barnard Class of 2019!
Lisa earned her BA in Neuroscience & Biology, Nushrat earned her BA in Biology, and Taylor earned her BA in Biology. They are the first graduating members of the Pischedda Lab!

Congratulations to Lisa who presented her senior thesis work today at the Neuroscience & Behavior Symposium!

A new preprint of my work with Michael Shahandeh and Tom Turner at UCSB is now available on bioRxiv! In this paper we identify two genes associated with behavioral differences between Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans. 

I was featured in the First-Gen Faculty Spotlight on Barnard's Student Success Blog. Fun fact: I was the first in my family to go to college!