Dr. Sethuraman was recently awarded 2019's "Kerri Mowen Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award" by CSUSM's President Ellen Neufeldt and Drs. Julie Jameson and Robert Iafe, on behalf of the CUGR (Committee for Undergraduate Research) and Office of Graduate Studies and Research. Kudos to all his amazing mentees for nominating him!

Congratulations to our amazing collaborator, Dr. Elinne Becket and her team for publishing the draft genomes of three bacterial strains isolated from cleanrooms from the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover at NASA! Special congratulations to Sethuraman Lab undergrads, Roxane Saisho, Dylan Steinecke, and Jeff Jaureguy on being co-authors on this manuscript! Read the manuscript here.

The Sethuraman Lab is continuing to science in these crazy times, socially distanced and wearing our PPE in graduate student Alicia's garage. Special thanks to Alicia's mom for hosting us so graciously! Meanwhile, we welcome Walker, Camila, and Tim to the lab this Summer! We sincerely hope that you are all staying safe and sane out there - please take care of yourselves, and yours, and science on.

A 2019 manuscript from the Sethuraman Lab, spearheaded by our talented alums Bryce, Khyati, Nicolette, Christy, Ken, Gwen, and Stefany was recently ranked among the top 10% of all downloaded papers in Molecular Ecology Resources (Impact Factor: 7.05)! Congratulations to all! Read the paper here.

Arun recently presented his and Melissa's work on understanding linked natural selection versus differential introgression effects on regions of modern human genomes up- and down-stream of putatively introgressed Altai Neanderthal haplotypes at the TAGC Online conference, in the session on Demographic Inference, organized by Dmitry Petrov. You can watch the full video of his talk here.

Gwen and Ryan recently presented their research at the CSUPERB Research Symposium in Santa Clara! Congratulations to both of them!

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Bryce successfully defended his Masters thesis on "Population genomics and the efficacy of augmentative biocontrol in three species of predatory lady beetles"! One of his thesis chapters, on the lack of phenotypic variation among Eastern and Western populations of Hippodamia convergens can be accessed here. He has since moved on to start a molecular biologist position at Illumina Inc. Congratulations, and best wishes to him on his new venture!

Melissa successfully defended her Masters thesis this Summer! Congratulations to her, and you can read more about her research here in her new manuscript titled "The Effects of Gene Flow from Unsampled Ghost Populations Under the Isolation with Migration Model", now available as a preprint on BioRxiv.

Our Summer Scholars, Ryan and Roxanne, REU scholar, Jerrika, and student assistants Tanairi, and Al presented their summer research on competition assays in Eastern and Western populations of convergent lady beetles, and RNAseq to quantify differential gene expression across life history stages. Congratulations on a successful summer!

Arun had the honor of being invited to present his research at the 5th Annual BCB Symposium at Iowa State University in April 2019, 6 years after graduating from ISU! He also had the great opportunity to catch up with his PhD co-advisor, Dr. Karin Dorman, and other friends and family from the BCB program.