Mar 2021
We are excited to welcome Lourenço Martins to the Williams lab as a new PhD student! Lourenço will start in Fall 2021.
Jan 2021
NSF Rules of Life postdoc applications are open, with Lauren Buckley and Sean Schoville: http://faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley/?p=685
Come work on grasshoppers in Colorado mountains! Review of applications start Feb 15.
Dec 2020
Williams lab enjoyed our annual Holiday Party online this year, with the highlight being a virtual White Elephant!
A Unifying Ecophysiological framwork for animal dormancy: paper just out with Kate Wilsterman and Mallory Ballinger:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.13718
A great but challenging project that was about 5 years in the making! So good to see it out.
Nov 2020
Congratulations to talented undergraduate researcher DéJenaé See for winning an award for best senior ePoster in Computational and Systems Biology at ABRCMs 2020!
Jun 2020
Great news - the Williams lab, in collaboration with Lauren Buckley and Sean Schoville, has just received a Rules of Life grant from the National Science foundation. Our Rule of Life: Quantify the ways that survival and reproductive constraints vary along environmental gradients. We will use Lauren's beautiful grasshopper system: https://www.biology.washington.edu/people/profile/lauren-buckley. Looking forward to working with Lauren and Sean, and a new field work site in Colorado mountains!
May 2019
The Spring 2019 Williams lab Undergraduate research symposium was a huge success! We heard about thermal preferences and aerobic scope of crickets, beetle lipids, tardigrade cold responses, and molecular convergence of dormancy. Thanks to all our talented undergraduates for a wonderful semester, and to the grad students for providing high quality mentoring.
March 2019
Congratulations to Lisa Treidel for receiving the Outstanding GSI award from the Graduate Division!
Feb 2019
Welcome to Ruud Schilder, who will be spending part of his sabbatical in the Williams lab! Ruud is an Assistant Professor at Penn State and a comparative physiologist who is interested in muscle function. Great to have him here!
December 2018
Caroline braves the cold and goes to Montana to give a seminar in mid-winter. I had a wonderful trip, gracefully hosted by Art Woods and Victoria Dahlhoff at University of Montana. Met lots of interesting people, talked a lot about winter, and got my fill of snow for the year!
Nov 2018
Caroline attended the National Association of Biology teachers conference in San Diego to present a series of labs that we are developing for high schools, using lady beetles to study responses to climate change. We got a great attendance at our session, and many teachers were enthusiastic about trialing our labs. The initial phase of the project, Data Nuggets about the experiments, are now available online:
http://datanuggets.org/2018/10/nabt-2018/ (contains links to my slides from NABT workshop)
http://datanuggets.org/2018/11/beetle-its-cold-outside/
The National Science Foundation has featured our willow leaf beetle work on their tumblr: http://nationalsciencefoundation.tumblr.com/post/181310311788/battling-the-changing-winter-weatherwillow-beetle
October 2018
Williams and Vazquez-Medina labs attended American Physiological Society Intersociety meeting! Great sessions on thermal performance curves, hibernation in space flight (!), and evolution of thermal performance curves. The conference ended with a banquet, award presentations, and a wonderful plenary by Ray Huey (with an entertaining and poignant introduction by Jon Harrison, which included a poem about lizard thermoregulation!).
September 2018
Congratulations to Lisa Treidel for being selected as a finalist in the Scholander award competition at the American Physiological Society Intersociety meeting in New Orleans on Oct 25-28, 2018. This is one of the most prestigious awards for junior comparative physiologists.
July 2018
Lab field trip to Sedgwick Reserve! We had a wonderful time as usual. Not many male crickets this year, the fields were quiet. Probably because of high parasitism from tachinid flies, which are attracted to the male song. But, we caught plenty of females for our experiments and lab colonies!
March 2018
Great undergraduate research presentations in lab meeting yesterday! Our undergraduates are working on uncoupling proteins, lipid mobilization, and thermal performance curves in crickets, distribution and thermal tolerance of marine tardigrades, and overwintering energetics in willow leaf beetles. Lots of fun stuff!
Jan 2018
New Year's resolution - keep up with updating lab news! Williams lab had a great time at Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting! Caroline was presented with the George A. Bartholemew award and gave a plenary lecture on the Evolutionary Impacts of Winter. Kevin presented on the impacts of late season cold exposure on willow leaf beetles, Lisa presented on the role of mitochondrial plasticity in life history adaptation in crickets, Rebecca talked about the energetics of a life history trade-off in the wild, Emily showed how New Zealand mud snails perform under hypoxic conditions, Chris (undergraduate researcher) presented a poster on circadian rhythms in activity in crickets, and Priyanka (high school student) presented a poster on the development of life history investments in crickets. A fun meeting was had by all!
Also, congratulations to Lisa for obtaining a SICB grant in aid of research for her work on measuring oxidative stress in crickets !
We are sad to say good bye to Rebecca this month.
Dec 2017
Congratulations to Rebecca Clark for her new faculty position at Sienna College in New York! We will miss Rebecca, but are excited to see her start up her own lab!
We are sad to say goodbye ot Baojun Sun. You've been the heart of our lab for the past year Baojun, we'll miss you!
Dec 2016
We are excited to welcome visiting scholar, Bao Jun Sun, to the lab! Bao Jun comes to us from Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, where he studies thermal biology of lizards and other ectotherms. He will be with us for a year. You can read about his work here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bao-jun_Sun
7 Sep 2016
New paper out in the Williams lab!
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1838/20161317 (DOI 10.1098/rspb.2016.1317)
Here we show that selection for rapid recovery from chill coma results in faster nutrient flux through core metabolic pathways. This means that cold adaptation comes at a cost, that may reduce an organisms ability to invest in other life history traits.
Aug 2016
Welcome to the lab, new PhD students Andre Szejner Sigal, Emily King, and Ana Lyons! The lab is getting busier!
26 Jul 2016
We just got back from a fun and successful field trip to Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley (http://sedgwick.nrs.ucsb.edu/). Check out the photos page soon for some pics!
Jul 2016
Andre Szejner, incoming PhD student, went to North Dakota to scan beetle trachaea (air filled tubes that beetles use to breath) in collaboration with Kendra Greenlee and Bryan Helm. He got some awesome scans that are really works of art! Check them out on the research page. Looking forward to welcoming Andre to the lab in August.
April 2016
Congratulations to Lisa Treidel for winning an Orthopteran Society grant for her work on the impact of diet and nutrition on energy stores in Gryllus crickets!
Mar 2016
Congratulations to Lisa Treidel, who has won a research grant from the Valentine Reserve to conduct field overwintering experiments on willow leaf beetles in the Sierra Nevadas! Way to go Lisa!
Feb 2016
More congratulations to Kevin Roberts, for winning a mini-grant from White Mountain Research Station to help fund his work exploring the effects of snow on willow leaf beetle overwintering. Great work Kevin!
Jan 2016
Congratulations to Kevin Roberts, who has been awarded a SICB Grant in Aid of Research for his proposed work on hypoxia tolerance in willow leaf beetles.
Nov 2015
Welcome to our new postdoc, Rebecca Clark! Great to have you here!
18 Aug 2015
Welcome to our second new PhD student, Kevin Roberts! The lab is now complete, until postdoc Rebecca Clark arrives in November.
10 Aug 2015
Welcome to our first PhD student, Lisa Treidel! We are excited to have you here.
4 Aug 2015
It is a bittersweet time in the Williams lab - we are sadly saying goodbye to our superb lab manager, Tony Huynh, and our summer researchers Angie Lao and Andrea Tam. But we are looking forward to welcoming new PhD students Lisa Treidel and Kevin Roberts in a few week's time, and postdoc Rebecca Clark later in the Fall.
1 June 2015
Welcome to our newest undergraduate researcher, Andrea Tam. Andrea will be in the lab over the summer, working on building a life history table for the crickets.
18 May 2015
Farewell to Leo! Leo has had a very productive 5 months in the lab, and we are very sad to say goodbye. We wish him all the best with his next adventure - a 4 month internship in India! Meanwhile, the Williams lab is preparing to move to our new space in VLSB - move day tomorrow!
7 May 2015
Welcome to our newest undergraduate researcher, Annie Sompayrac! Annie has already rolled up her sleeves and gotten to work on the cricket experiment, with Leo and Katelyn. We are making the most of Leo's last few weeks in the lab.
2 Feb 2015
Today we are excited to have George Somero visiting to give the BiGCB seminar. George has been one of my academic inspirations since the beginning of my PhD, so we are all looking forward to having the chance to spend some time with him. His work provides some of the best examples of the integrative study of thermal adaptation. Read more about it here:
http://somero.stanford.edu/george.html
30 Jan 2015
We have a new undergraduate joining the lab - welcome to Katelyn Adam! Katelyn will be working with Leo to study circadian rhythms in metabolism in the crickets.
23 Jan 2015
We have two prospective graduate students visiting today - welcome to Kevin Roberts and Lisa Treidel!
20 Jan 2015
Williams lab is advertising a postdoctoral position to study how variable winter environments drive the evolution of metabolic physiology. Go here for a description of the position, and to apply!
https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply/JPF00640
17 Nov 2014
Welcome to the lab, Léo Darrigade! Léo is a visiting scholar from France, and will be in the lab for 4 months working on circadian cycles in metabolism in the crickets!
29 Oct 2014
Today in lab meeting we discussed some important principals of experimental design - check out the handout I have put on the Resources page for some things to consider when designing your experiments.
21 Oct 2014
The equipment is really starting to flow into the lab now - we will be up and running with experiments in the next month. Exciting to see it all coming together.
15 Oct 2014
Tony Zera is coming to visit the lab for a few days, and bringing crickets! Excited to have some new insects in the lab. And to hang out with Tony of course!
16 Sept 2014
Welcome to the lab Varun Bahl, Hannah Berman, Mimi Zhao, and Vish Venkataraman!
15 Sept 2014
Williams lab paper accepted in Evolution! Look out for it in upcoming issue.
3 Sept 2014
The Williams lab now has three members - welcome to Rose Kang, new undergraduate researcher!
URAP applications close today, so make sure those applications are in!
1 Sept 2014
Tony and Caroline just got back from a weekend in the Sierra Nevada mountains, bringing with them > 300 willow leaf beetles for winter experiments! Thanks to Nathan Rank for a great trip.
14 August 2014
Williams lab has a new lab manager - welcome to the lab Tony Huynh!
12 August 2014
I am recruiting three undergraduate researchers for the Fall and Spring semesters. Project descriptions are now posted on the URAP website:(http://research.berkeley.edu/urap/projects/detail.lasso?id_list=Int0676). Go check them out! Looking forward to working with some of Berkeley's talented undergrads!
1 August 2014
Low temperature incubators have arrived, all ready for our beetles to settle in when they arrive in early September.
25 July 2014
Equipment is starting to arrive at the Williams lab! We have our high-sensitivity respirometry rig from Sable Systems, a TLC-FID from Iatroscan, and some computers. More to come!