The Fall quarter has just begun and there’s lots of exciting developments happening in the Hammer Lab! Most importantly, we have two new Ph.D. students, Jen and Nickole, a new undergraduate researcher, Perla, and a “postdoc-in-residence” (officially starting in January 2023), Annika. Thanks to a lot of hard work by Kristal, the lab now has all of the shiny new equipment we need in place, and a bunch of consumables to get rolling with projects. Toby’s paper on temporal dynamics in the bumble bee gut microbiome was recently accepted at Molecular Ecology, and the lab is cooking up a few more papers to submit this quarter. We also said goodbye to summer researcher Thuy-Tien, who headed back to Berkeley to finish her senior year, but are excited to see what she does next!