January 30, 2015
Congratulations to Kaitlin
…For winning the best early career poster award at the International Biogeography Society Meeting! Jessica, Kaitlin, and Eric attended this year’s IBS meeting in Bayreuth, Germany to present posters on various research projects. Kaitlin’s poster, entitled “Community level models outperform traditional species distribution models in no analog climates” won the award for best early career poster….
September 19, 2014
Blois lab welcomes Dr. Hillary Young to UC Merced
We are excited to welcome Hillary Young to UC Merced today. Dr. Young is speaking in the Quantitative and Systems Biology seminar today on her work linking biodiversity to zoonotic pathogens. Information about Dr. Young and her talk: Cascading Effects of Biodiversity Loss Across Spatial Scales Friday, 9/19 1:30-2:45pm COB 267 Abstract: Biodiversity loss is…
August 25, 2014
Summer re-cap
Today marks the transition from summer to fall (in terms of the school year, at least) and wow, it’s been a busy summer. Jessica was involved in a variety of projects- working to get papers off her desk and into review, working up in Yosemite with an awesome REU intern, and at the end of summer,…
May 13, 2014
A good way to end the semester
We had a lab party on Sunday, with all lab members and their families. We had much to celebrate: Eric finished his first year at UC Merced, Kaitlin got settled into the lab (and it was her birthday!), Juliane finished her B.S. in Human Ecology, and Zara, Joceline, Stefanie, and Tyonia joined the lab this past…
March 27, 2014
Spring break!
It’s spring break here at UC Merced, which gives me a chance to cross off a whole host of to-do items that have been lingering on my list all semester (including these website updates). Life has been busy, productive, and happy here in Merced. I’m teaching an awesome class this semester- Ecosystems of California- which…
December 14, 2013
#MyGenderGap
A recent trend amongst the scientists I follow on twitter is to calculate our gender gaps in authorship (see #MyGenderGap). This interesting trend is in response to a recent article in Nature, and a challenge for each of us to calculate our own data and turn our glare on our own house. I decided to…
October 24, 2013
Travel, travel, travel
It’s been a very busy fall, for me and for the lab. The fall has been a period of building up the lab. In August we welcomed our first grad student, Eric Williams, into the lab. And then in October, Juliane Liberto joined the lab to help us sort through fossils. Finally, Kaitlin Maguire will…
August 30, 2013
Summer is coming to an end
Whew. It’s been a busy summer! Classes started this week and it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on what I was up to over the summer. I started out by visiting the Smithsonian for a working group meeting. Read more about my visit and thoughts on working groups in general here….
August 2, 2013
Check out the Science podcast about our recent paper
The podcast can be found here. My part runs from about 13:48 to 22:12.
August 1, 2013
New paper out today in Science!
I’ve got a new paper out today! This paper is a review on the influence of climate change on biotic interactions, focusing on past, present, and future episodes of climatic and ecological change. This paper was done in collaboration with Phoebe Zarnetske, Matt Fitzpatrick, and Seth Finnegan– a diverse group of folks spanning the spectrum from deep-time paleo (Seth) to…