The Yoder Lab is officially NSF-funded!

I’m delighted to finally, officially announce that the lab has received funding from the National Science Foundation — for a big, collaborative endeavor we’ve been calling the Joshua Tree Genome Project. Collaborative grants to us here at CSUN and to Chris Smith’s lab at Willamette University, with subawards to collaborators at USGS and the Universities of Alabama and Hawai’i Mānoa will support four years of experiments, fieldwork, and genomic analysis to learn how Joshua trees cope with climate extremes, how their populations might adapt to climate change, and how adaptation to climate has affected the tree’s coevolution with their hyper-specialized pollinators.

Among the big practical outcomes of this funding, for the Yoder Lab, are support for graduate student research stipends and undergraduate research assistants, as well as two years of support for a postdoctoral researcher. The postdoc position will be, I think, exceptionally well suited as a starting point for competitive applications to opportunities like the Smith Fellowship as well — I will be working to start the formal job-search and hiring process this fall, so keep an eye out.