What’s up?
Regular updates from fieldwork, the lab and our Melastome Seminar Series -Virtual!
Bringing the tropics to Vienna
by Benjamin Lazarus (PhD student) Over the past year, we have been gathering a bourgeoning collection of Melastome species housed in the Botanical Garden of Vienna … and we have been putting these new specimens to good use! Our...
Motherhood and amazing colleagues!
The past months have been a little different for my lab with me being on maternity leave and dividing my time between childcare and work during nap times. First, I have to say - while it is challenging sometimes, it is also...
Fieldwork in Ecuador and Brazil
Hello world! It’s Ben and Ash from South America… Agnes explained the thrust of our project best in her recent post “Rhexia fieldwork II: buzz-flower biomechanics” so make sure to check that out! But if two tabs is too many for...
ERC Starting grant: MountBuzz
I am beyond thrilled to finally share the news that I have been awarded an ERC Starting grant for studying how plant-pollinator interaction networks and floral traits change along elevational gradients across the tropics. The...
Rhexia fieldwork II: buzz-flower biomechanics
After a very successful and insightful field season in 2022, Ash, Ben and Agnes are back to the field to study buzz-pollination in the small Melastomataceae genus Rhexia! Rhexia represent the only genus in the family which has...
First semester as a new PI is coming to an end…
My first semester as a new PI at the University of Vienna is coming to an end... transitioning from being a postdoc to a PI - brought some surprises for me, and some things just stayed the same! Like many other postdocs, I have...
The Dellinger lab is opening its doors!
I am moving back to Austria to start my own lab on Plant-Animal-Interactions at the University of Vienna on March 1st! 😀 It was a dream to get a job close to my hometown, family and friends, and Vienna offers a wonderful...
Busy fall: proposals, papers, analyses, meetings
After all the fieldwork in summer, fall was about crunching deeply into data analyses, paper and proposal writing... we have some exciting results to share about Merianieae diversification in the Neotropics from the modelling...
A fun side project with high-school student Leah Maier
Local students from Boulder High School are supposed to do applied science projects - how fun! Finally, fellow Smith-lab postdoc Miranda Sinnott-Armstrong and I could team up to combine our interests in two incredibly important...
Summer fieldwork 2022, part 2: pollination of co-flowering Rhexia!
At the beginning of July, I travelled from Colorado to Florida (what a move to make for a climber in the middle of summer ;-)) to work on the Melastomataceae genus Rhexia (meadow beauties)! This is a small genus of only about 11...