Pryce Millikin, the current Master’s student in the Yoder Lab, has won not one but three external awards providing financial support for his thesis research. Pryce started in the lab last fall, and hit the ground running on a project to understand how climate variation might impact the specialized pollinators of Joshua trees, the yucca…
One of the biggest challenges for studying biodiversity is answering a seemingly simple question, where does this species live? If we know where a species occurs, we can describe the habitat that it needs, assess how large and stable its populations are, and make informed predictions about what will happen to those populations if we…
Revive & Restore, a nonprofit devoted to supporting the application of genomic data in conservation biology, funded the Yoder Lab’s sequencing of 300 Joshua tree genomes in a “genomic inventory” of the species as part of their Wild Genomes initiative. In the spring of 2021, Yoder Lab members fanned out across the Mojave Desert to…
TREELOGY is a series of musical compositions commissioned by the Soraya, CSUN’s performing arts center, to celebrate three iconic tree species of California: coast redwoods, giant sequoias, and the Yoder Lab’s favorite, Joshua trees. TREELOGY premieres in just a few weeks, and this episode of the MusiKaravan vlog travels to Joshua Tree National Park to…
The Mojave Desert, home to the lab’s favorite woody monocot (Joshua tree), encompasses some of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the continental United States. That wilderness is under increasing pressure from suburban sprawl as climate change threatens to make its desert landscapes even less hospitable to the thousands of unique native plant and…
A new paper from the lab — coauthored with all three of the Yoder Lab’s graduate student alumni — is now online ahead of print in the journal Evolution Letters. In it, we analyze population genetic data from 20 pairs of plants and herbivores, parasites, and mutualists that live intimately on those plants to test for evidence that the associate species’…
Master’s student Cate MacGregor successfully defended her dissertation this morning. Cate’s thesis project uses RADseq data to look for evidence of local adaptation to climate in populations of moths so specialized that we know next to nothing about their lives when they’re not on their host plant — the pollinators of Joshua trees. Working from samples…
The Yoder Lab at California State University Northridge is hiring a Postdoctoral Scholar to contribute to ongoing NSF-funded research examining Joshua tree’s adaptation to desert climates and coevolution with specialized pollinators, as part of the Joshua Tree Genome Project.
Queer scientists who don’t feel able to openly express their minority identities in the workplace pay a cost in research productivity, according to results of a new Queer in STEM study, which is now online at PLOS ONE. This new paper, coauthored by Joey Nelson and Allison Mattheis, presents analysis of responses to the Queer…
The Yoder Lab at CSUN is recruiting up to two Master’s students to start in Fall 2022, to develop thesis projects within our ongoing work on the evolutionary genomics of Joshua tree and its coevolution with specialized pollinators.
