Moving to California

Good news!

I'll be moving out to the West Coast at the beginning of July. I've taken a position as a lab tech at UC Davis (in Davis, California..."the Auburn of UC schools" according to my advisor...too many cow pastures!) in the Shaffer Lab. The great thing about this job is that I already know Brad Shaffer and several of his students and postdocs from the Bodega Bay Applied Phylogenetics Workshop I attended there back in March.

UC Davis has an entire College of Biological Sciences (as opposed to just a department, like at UA), and the Evolution & Ecology graduate program is ranked #2 (Chronicle of Higher Education) and #4 (US News & World Report) nationally. While I won't be a student there, it will be great to be a part of such a prestigious community and a much-sought-after lab. Basically I will be doing a TON of genetic sequencing of various species of turtles (it's more complicated than that, but that's the gist).

Of course, all of this is assuming I pass comps and finish the thesis.....