On May 1 the lab celebrated the end of a tough but productive semester! Five papers submitted and a lot of work put in. The lovely Ariane Peralta send over an Edible Arrangement to celebrate Lily's tenure packet submission and we all chowed down :)

Belated congrats to postdoc @ian-oiler.bsky.social for winning a poster award at the RUMP (Rutgers University Microbiome Program) Symposium! He presented his work on honeypot-associated Fructilactobacillus genomes and genome-scale metabolic models. Thanks RUMP and the RAD Collaboratory!

A new paper, "Honeypots: a review of repletism across the ants" from our lab was published today, with grad student Bianca Nogueira as first author, and co-authors DiemQuynh Nguyen, @adriatica.bsky.social, and @haidomyrmex.bsky.social. It was a labor of love! doi.org/10.25849/myr... 🧵

Together with the @brittbertolet.bsky.social lab, we decorated cookies and will take them to the department holiday party later this week 🎅

Most of the lab attended the Theobald Smith Society meeting last week. Faith, DiemQuynh and Ian all presented posters, and DiemQuynh presented a brief talk on her work. We all learned a lot, received great feedback and had great conversations with other attendees. @njmicrobe.bsky.social

The team is all here! Faith, DiemQuynh and Bianca (PhD students), Lashon (undergrad), Lily (PI) and Ian (postdoc). Excited for a lot of great science from a group of excellent people.

Good fun in the field with DiemQuynh who is learning how to collect honeypot ants while hanging upside down