I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

Developing a course is all about realizing how much stuff you take for granted / understand intuitively in your subfield that you didn't even realize you needed to explain

Factory resetting your computer these days means having to turn off like 10 different AI assistants every time you install something

Huge congrats to my first PhD student Olivia Frary who was awarded an NSF GRFP!!!

Capitalism certainly has its flaws but one thing I do appreciate is the tremendous diversity of hot sauces it produces, which help keep me sane when I am trying to lose weight 😅

Out now in @newphyt.bsky.social with @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @jotlovell.bsky.social, @spicybotrytis.bsky.social & more! Our high-quality pennycress pangenome is a striking example of genome architecture shaping different kinds of genomic variation, including some surprising centromeric movement

For anyone curious, I went with Cowen's History of Life 6th edition. Kinda pumped to read it. Will report back 🫡

coke zero is one of life's great joys

Okay hold up. We could be seeing a manned Moon mission in the next couple of weeks? Why am I just hearing about this now?!?!?!?

Can anyone recommend a good, modern textbook on the history and diversity of life on Earth? Something that covers major evolutionary innovations, systematics and the tree of life, key radiations and extinction events, etc. Ideally upper undergrad level. For course development!

POV you are writing a paper about plant sex chromosome evolution

"Weekends are sacred no work allowed" vs. "I often do my best writing on Sunday afternoon in a cafe"

Every year daylight savings provides fascinating insights into how much biological clocks rule over my daily activities

remember when the boat got stuck

Training until failure but it's your brain's ability to write words

Is the EM algorithm machine learning

Word is such an annoying piece of software but I am so glad they integrated LaTeX into its equation editor

sitting back, relaxing, and filling in my first annual activity report

Slim 5 can now simulate genomes with multiple chromosomes like autosomes, sex chromosomes, mitochondria and chloroplast dna academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

TIL that in linguistics they have their own version of ancestral state reconstruction for languages that they also call the comparative method. Fun!

Has somebody tried telling the government that when people die they can't spend their money at businesses

Going from Rochester winter to Baton Rouge winter

Very excited to share the capstone of my postdoc work with @stepheniwright.bsky.social, co-led by Wright lab grad student Cassandre with contributions from many others. We combined new methods with high-quality Rumex assemblies to dive into the remarkable history of rearrangement in this genus.

Surely this is not the same amygdala my ancestors were using to fend off wolf packs and grizzly bears

There is a lot of stuff going on. I feel it would be nice if there wasn't as much stuff going on

When you look at your old code and you're impressed that past you was able to figure all that out

So far my experience of winter in Rochester is that it's basically a coin flip whether you're going to get pelted on the face with hail on your commute home from work

I may have neglected writing the documentation for this R package for a bit too long

clouds 😑

i like snow

Still a few more days to apply to our open faculty position! This is a stellar department to be an evolutionary geneticist. I've really enjoyed my time here so far. Feel free to DM if you have any questions! apply.interfolio.com/173431

I've seen riparian plots you people wouldn't believe

Not to post spoilers but the history of chromosomal rearrangements in Rumex is genuinely breaking my brain right now. Excited to share with y'all

🙃

As a biologist I am pretty envious of the explanatory power of the "everyone is 12" theory

Happy to chat with any potential applicants who want to work in plant phylogenomics!

the lion does not concern himself with factor of 2 errors

New preprint led by grad student, Yu Mo! We introduce new software to calculate evolutionary rates of quantitative characters in the presence of discordance 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

First grant submitted 🙏

Memories of Lake Superior Old Woman Bay, Ontario July 2016 #WeekNforNights #AlphabetChallenge #EastCoastKin #sunset #ShareCanGeo #blueskyphotography #PukaskwaNP #LakeSuperior

Looks like only first year grads can apply now

The Board of Coalescence is nearly full

UR Biology is hiring an Assistant Professor in mathematical/computational evolutionary genetics. Join us! apply.interfolio.com/173431

too many documents

super excited to share this big project with @daeaton.bsky.social out now in Systematic Biology! We derived distributions for -- given an arbitrary species tree model -- how far you have to move along a genome before observing a change in the underlying genealogy: doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

writing a phylogenetics-oriented grant without using the word "diversity" or any of its derivatives

when the first September hits as a new PI

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

I'm a little bit late, but happy to see this new paper led by @imillercrews.bsky.social and anchored by @rosvall-lab.bsky.social now out on bioRxiv. We analyze comparative songbird RNA-seq data using new features in our software package, CAGEE. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Being a PI is definitely a step up in responsibility and workload but so far I am really enjoying it. I'm being challenged in an incredibly fulfilling way that I haven't felt probably since I was a first year grad student.