March 2024. We finished our evolution experiment!!! Massive recognition to Zahraa and Thibault for enduring five grueling months of daily transfers. These results will shed light on the eco-evolutionary dynamics occurring in the Actinetobacter-Pseudomonas consortium over 1000 generations.

August 2023. We are starting our NSF-funded evolution experiment! Shout out to Zahraa, who is doing a fantastic job leading this massive experiment to study speciation in microbial communities!

June 2023. Parmis graduated with honors! We are very proud to have witnessed Parmis’ growth and are impressed by all the excellent research she conducted in the lab.

Luckily, Parmis is not done with the lab yet, and she graciously accepted to stay over the summer and work as a laboratory assistant.

 

 

May 2023. Excellent news! First, our NSF collaborative grant “ORCC: Do multi-species biofilms accelerate microbial evolution under extreme warming?” got funded. Through this collaboration with the Treseder and the Alison lab, we will study the interactions between fungi and bacteria in the context of climate change.

Second, Ashton received the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowship for Summer 2023. We congratulate Ashton and Zahraa (lab mentor) for this great achievement. Ashton will investigate the impact of stress on the evolution of species interactions.

 

April 2023. Gabriela and Parmis presented great posters as part of the Undergraduate Excellence in Research Program.

January 2023

We are thrilled to welcome two new lab members, undergraduate Ashton Craven and Marco Brunyer.

December 2022. Excited to share the news that our collaborative grant UC Alianza MX-Cinvestav, “Looking for clues to today’s problem of antibiotic-resistant strains in ancient microbial mats.“ got funded.

November 2022. Thrilled to announce that our NSF DEB grant “Role of ecological interactions on diversification of coexisting species in microbial communities” got funded! This grant will support our continuous efforts to study interactions between Acinetobacter-Pseudomonas.

August 2022. Zahraa delivered an outstanding presentation at the ESA 2022 annual meeting in Montreal!

June 2022. The month of good news!

• Autumn published her first 1st-author paper from her master’s project in the ASM’s Spectrum journal: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.02330-21. We congratulate Autumn on this big milestone!
• Zahraa’s abstract was selected for a talk at this year’s ESA meeting in Montreal!
• Parmis received (again!) the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowship for Summer 2022.

Undergraduate student Miriam Lepiz received the UCI Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) from the Minority Science Program (2022)

 

Gabriela Martinez was awarded the Summer Research Scholars Program (SRSP) from the California Alliance for Minority Participation.

 

 

June 22, 2022. The Rodriguez-Verdugo lab attended the first UCI Microbiome Science Gala to recognize the accomplishments of our dedicated students, faculty, and staff!

 

 

 

 

 

September 2021. Joining all the way from Michigan State University, we are thrilled to welcome Zahraa Al-Tameemi, our second grad student! Zahraa will be studying the evolution of microbial interactions using synthetic microbial communities.

 

August 2021. New Commentary “Evolving interactions and emergent functions in microbial consortia” featuring some of our exciting lab directions is now out!

July 2021. Autumn was selected for the 2021/2022 California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive  Program (CDIP). This selection reflects her promise as a doctoral student and her interest in pursuing future tenure-track faculty opportunities in the California State University system. We are very excited for her!

 

June 2021. Congratulations to our undergraduate Parmis Abdoli who has received the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowship for Summer 2021 and will continue our efforts to create a Synthetic Microbial Community Representative of the Leaf Litter Microbiome from Loma Ridge in Irvine, California!

 

October 2020. Our paper on the evolution of species in interactions in fluctuating environments is finally out in the ISME Journal!

The paper comes along with a Behind the paper piece ‘Your neighbours evolution matters!‘ commenting on the challenges associated with conducting evolution experiments with simple communities.

 

August 2020. Bittersweet news: 1) Zoran Marinkovic finished his postdoc and is moving to his next exciting research opportunity in Paris; he will be missed! 2) We are thrilled to welcome our first graduate student, Autumn Henderson, who just joined the lab through the Competitive Edge Summer Program. We are so excited to have her on board!

 

 

 

July 2020. Congratulations to our undergraduate Melissa Martens who has received the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowship for her proposed research project “Creating a Synthetic Microbial Community Representative of the Leaf Litter Microbiome from Loma Ridge in Irvine, California”!

 

April 2020. Check our first lab paper published in iScience in collaboration with Pam Yeh and Van Savage from UCLA: “Compounding effects of climate warming and antibiotic resistance“.