Curious about what happens to the gut microbiome and immunity across the host lifespan? Check out our paper now in press at Molecular Ecology!

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!

Thuy-Tien Bui is the latest beesearcher to join the lab! Thuy-Tien is an undergraduate student studying Conservation and Resource Studies at UC Berkeley, here conducting research for the summer. She is developing protocols for rearing wild-caught bumble bees and for automated behavioral tracking. Welcome!

We are honored to have received this award from the UCI Microbiome Center. As a matter of fact, we are actively investigating designs and prototypes for bumble bee diapers to enable passive, nondestructive gut microbiome sampling!

Our new study on bumblebee gut microbiome and transcriptome dynamics with age is now up on bioRxiv! Check out this twitter thread for a brief summary of our findings.

We are thrilled that Nickole Villabona will be doing a Ph.D. in the lab, beginning this Fall! Nickole studied microbiology and entomology at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, and brings serious skills in bioinformatics, bumblebee ecology, and science communication. Welcome Nickole!!

We are very excited to welcome Jen Schlauch, a scientist, naturalist and artist of many talents, who is joining the lab as a Ph.D. student this Fall! And, she received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Go Jen!!

Bee biologist / pollination ecologist extraordinaire Kristal Watrous joins the lab today as a research specialist and lab manager. Welcome Kristal!!