Celebrating successes!

In times of uncertainty it is more important than ever to celebrate successes – and while it is a challenging time to be in science (especially academic science) it remains a wonderful community to be part of and an incredibly rewarding job! Among my favorite parts of this career is watching as trainees find their unique scientific identities and superpowers and turn them into success. Over the last few months we have received several such pieces of great news, including:

Postdoctoral researcher Kate Ennis won the 2025 L’Oreal USA for Women in Science fellowship! See the wonderful video profile of Kate and the other outstanding scientists here: https://www.loreal.com/en/usa/pages/group/fwis/

Postdoctoral researcher Milo Johnson received a grant from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study to collaborate with Christopher Frøhlich at the Arctic University of Norway on their project: “Visualizing The Molecular Mechanisms Of Trade-Offs For Antibiotic Innovation.” He got to spend a month this summer exploring both these ideas and the Arctic itself!

Rising second year graduate student Bri Baumbach was awarded a Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Research Grant to support her research project, “Environmental Influence on Morphological Variation of Lace Lichens.” She also received a grant from the California Lichen Society for her work on “Untangling coastal cladonia: taxonomy, phylogenetics, and diversity in california”

Rising fifth year graduate student Claire Evensen received the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) Rosemary Grant award for graduate research excellence as well as a PEO scholarship to support the final year of her dissertation.

Undergraduate researcher Lauren Holland was awarded a Rosehill scholarship to support her summer research on fungi infecting picture plants.

Rising second year graduate student Niko Darci-Maher was selected to join the NIH-funded Genetic Dissection of Cells and Organisms training program here at Berkeley, and also received a grant from the California Lichen Society to support his project on “Comparative entanglement analysis of five California fruticose lichen species with varying lichenization divergence times”

Finally, rising forth year graduate student Darian Doakes was selected to be a 2025 HHMI Gilliam fellow! See more on that here: https://www.hhmi.org/programs/gilliam-fellows/2025-fellows Darian will continue their fantastic work exploring the role of prophages in microbial communities.

A huge congratulations to all! I remain extremely grateful to work with such a wonderful team and look forward to the next year of science. It promises to be a great one!