The recording of my talk for the 2025 IDEA plenary is now posted over on the Evolution meeting YouTube channel (there’s a bunch of dead air at the start of the recording; the action starts a bit after the 19 minute mark). A few folks have asked for copies of the slide deck, and you…
UPDATE: The live-stream of the talk will be available on the Evolution 2025 YouTube account, opening up at 6:45pm Eastern time. UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Here’s a followup post with the talk recording and a bibliography. The Evolution 2025 conference kicks off soon in Athens, Georgia, and I’m preparing not one but two presentations for…
Multiple Yoder Lab members celebrated graduations and accomplishments at the end of the 2024-2025 school year. Master’s student Pryce Millikin walked in last Friday’s commencement ahead of his planned dissertation defense in July, and undergrad researcher Daniel Dakduk collected his diploma after finishing classes at the end of the fall semester. A couple weeks earlier,…
Earlier this semester, the Yoder Lab PI joined Ellen Jarosz and Heidi Schumacher on their podcast Remnants of Resistance to discuss the genetics of same-sex attraction and our understanding of queer idenities. Jaroz is the head of Special Collections and Archives at CSUN’s University Library, and Schumacher teaches in CSUN’s Queer Studies — they’ve produced the…
Yoder Lab Master’s student Pryce Millikin has been awarded an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The GRFP provides three years of stipend support and research funding to master’s and doctoral students in all fields of science across the United States — this year only 1,000 applicants received GRF…
This is cross-posted from the Joshua Tree Genome Project website. Yoder Lab grad student Pryce Millikin needs your help observing Joshua trees to figure out where their specialized pollinator moths are active. Skip down to the three steps you can follow to help us, or read more background here: Joshua trees need our help. These…
This summer’s Evolution meetings in Montréal included an event that has become a popular part of the conference: a Story Collider show featuring stories told by conference attendees. The 2024 edition collected tales from “Outside the Distribution”, including personal experiences in fieldwork and navigating the early stages of a research career — and also the…
A new exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, showcases artistic and scientific perspectives on one of the most distinctive species in the MOAH’s own back yard: Joshua trees! Desert Forest: Life with Joshua trees presents creative visual works by a diverse array of artists, in an exhibition running from September…
The next scientific conference featuring Yoder Lab research is already underway, but it’s a good deal closer to our home base than Montréal — the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Long Beach, California. Here’s where you can see the very latest research on Joshua trees and their pollinators, considerably less than two hours from…
More than a century ago, in mid-June 1924, the Los Angeles Times devoted a photo spread and several column inches to the second-hand vacation story of some “Cadillac tourists” who saw Joshua trees bearing fruit. It meant, the Times reported, that rain was coming. M.C. Ellison of Sacramento, who has been touring Southern California in…
