This July, we are excited to host a special edition of The Story Collider for the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology. From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, you’ll hear five true, personal stories about science!
This event is currently only open to registered meeting participants.
Stories By:
Asher Coello is an NSF Research and Mentoring for Post-baccalaureates (RaMP) research fellow at the University of Connecticut. Driven by an admiration for the natural world and its diverse organisms, Coello is dedicated to advancing knowledge in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology. Despite a lack of undergraduate research, his experiences curating lab and museum collections sparked a new passion for entomology. Other than insects, Coello bugs out over amphibians, reptiles, fungi, and marine invertebrates. He aspires to someday use one or more of these systems to conduct further research in trait evolution, biodiversity & conservation, and/or population genomics. When not in the lab, he is either in the garden tending to his plants, in the woods on the search for different fascinating organisms, or experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.
Pauline Owusu-Ansah is a first year PhD student whose passion for evolutionary biology didn't fade off despite growing up in a place where scientists are known to be just medical doctors or engineers. Her story, "The lizard's leap..." capture's a journey from curiosity in Ghana, West Africa to becoming a scientist in this part of the world.
Jeremy B. Yoder is an evolutionary biologist, studying how living things shape each other's history, especially in mutually beneficial interactions. Much of his research has focused on Joshua trees, which have a highly specialized mutualism with pollinating yucca moths, and how the trees and the moths cope with the harsh climates of their desert habitat. He's also examined how flowers' shape determines the diversity of animals that visit them, the evolutionary dynamics of mutualism and other kinds of species interactions, and how we use genomic data to identify genes responsible for adaptation to different environments. He's a founding collaborator on the Joshua Tree Genome Project, and he's written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Awl, and Slate.
Ruby Mustill is an evolutionary biology PhD student at Texas A&M University. Before moving to Texas, she graduated from Columbia University with a BA in anthropology, studied monkeys in Puerto Rico, and managed a remote field site in Kasanka National Park, Zambia. Outside of research, Ruby spends her time knitting and talking at length about her elderly cat, Muffin. She hopes to work at a natural history museum in the future.
Chris Robinson is a published writer and PAm-Costco USA Scholar in the midst of his PhD at Indiana University. His research uses the honey bee as a model to study the ecology and evolution of the gut microbiome and how evolutionary adaptations, such as antibiotic resistance, are transmitted by mobile genetic elements. Originally from the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Chris has harvested watermelon with the USDA, spent a few years as a line cook in Charleston kitchens, and was formally a Fulbright Research Fellow in Ukraine. When not staring at a computer screen, Chris can be found deep into a bicycle ride, playing in the garden, or lamenting the failure of some baking experiment.