Hannah has not only passed her PhD with flying colours, she has been placed on the Health Sciences list of Exceptional PhD theses - go Hannah!

Congrats to July for receiving support from the Marjorie McCallum fund to attend the Bruce Weir Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics - what an opportunity!

Tyla and Nathan attended a mihi whakatau in Hamilton with Ngāti Korokī Kahukura and members of the "Safeguarding te mana o te awa o Waikato from emerging climatic pressures" MBIE Research Programme. It was great to meet everyone kanohi ki te kanohi  

We are welcoming Tyla and Maddie to the lab, and re-welcoming Daniel, as they start their studies - haere mai and it is great to have you here

Hannah handed in her thesis and gave her grad seminar in the Department, and gave a talk at the emerging aquatic diseases conference. Big week, and well done!

Aleisha has been accepted into the Neuroscience Interdisciplinary MSc programme in Oxford - amazing news!

Welcome to Aotearoa to Eisa from the Khorramshahr University of Marine Science and Technology! We are looking forward to hosting you and showing you the country

Emma is off exploring Antarctica on the Tangaroa! Safe travels and have a wonderful time! More about the trip here

We have been mentioned (obliquely) on the "That's what I call science" podcast! Check out our collaborator Claudia Bramley from FlowJoanna talking towards the end of the episode here 

Massive congrats to Aleisha, Emma, and Sebastian for their awesome results from their 4th year work - great stuff everyone!

Safe travels to Nico, who has been visiting the lab from Chile, doing SPLiTseq on oysters. Have a wonderful trip back and all the best for the rest of your PhD - see you again soon!

Congrats to Caleb for his poster award at the Biomolecular Horizons conference in Melbourne - wonderful stuff!

A big welcome to Ismael, who has joined the lab to work on a PhD studying comparative bryozoan growth, development and regeneration, together with Assoc Prof Megan Wilson (Anatomy)

Ella and Hannah gave presentations and Mary showed off her work in a super cool poster at the 2024 BMS Graduate Symposium! Congrats especially to Hannah who took away a prize for her talk, but you were all awesome! Mīharo!

We had a wonderful time at NanoFest! Check out what went on (and other cool sciency things) here

Hannah's paper on the effects of harmful algae on mussel reproduction is out here  

The Catalyst grant team, with members from the Universities of Tokyo, Sydney, Queensland, Otago and the NHM, London, have been super busy in Japan - and will have lots of exciting science to come!

Katerina's new paper on bryozoan biomineralisation is coming out! Have a peek

Nathan enjoyed chatting to everyone at the EMBO "Establishing state-of-the-art mollusc genomics" meeting - thanks to the organisers!

Hannah has published an excellent write up about harmful algae and her work in the ODT - check it out here

A big welcome to Nicolás Zuñiga who is visiting us from the Aguilera lab at UDEC, Chile! We are looking forward to showing you round!

Over the last few weeks we have hosted Professor Sally Leys from the University of Alberta, and have dug into spicules, talked sponges, and done some fieldwork! Our thanks to  the Chaffer Fellowship scheme from the Division of Health Sciences for supporting her travel

We had a blast at the Otago Museum for the world's first ever Sponge Day on the 10th of March! It was great to share the joys of sponges with lots of enthusiastic future biologists. See the write up here 

Many thanks to the GSA and AgResearch for their support of Mary's investigations of kuku resilience to climate change with a GSA Student Research Grant for 2023-24!

Ella has been awarded a scholarship by DOC for her Masters work on freshwater sponges. Details here

Huge congrats to Mary Hawkes for winning a prize at the 2023 NZ Mol Ecol meeting! (and the WilderLab eDNA raffle while you were at it!)

Katerina has written a thought-provoking article for the ODT - available here

Massive congratulations to Daisy Power, who was awarded the Ann Wylie prize for the best performance in 4th year Genetics. Ka rawe! Your work and thesis this year were hugely impressive!

A huge high 5 to Aleisha Chalmers for the GH Satchell Prize for her work in Zoology this year - amazing stuff!

The lab has been part of a number of successful bids in the 2023 Endeavour round, in collaboration with amazing people at Lincoln Agritech and the Cawthron Institute. Please watch this space for further news.

Mary was awarded a prize in the BMS Postgraduate Symposium for her poster on kuku single cell sequencing!

We have just been awarded a Catalyst Seeding grant to forge a collaboration with researchers in Japan, Australia and the UK on sea star colouration and its link to resilience

Hannah's first paper has just come out in Harmful Algae  Link

Caleb has joined the lab on a University of Otago PhD scholarship, examining the genetics and protein biochemistry of sea star colours

Daisy Power was awarded a Mike Murphy and Rob Smith Postgraduate Scholarship in Biochemistry towards her 400 level work!

Katerina has been on the Polaris 2, gathering all kinds of critters for molecular and morphological study (and getting a little sea sick) (Photo, Oscar Thomas)

Congratulations to Mary for being awarded a Brenda Shore Award for Women by the FGW to support your work with the Cawthron!

We had a blast attending the Science Wānanga held at the Araiteuru Marae here in Dunedin at the start of March - it was great to have a chance to introduce the wonderful world of biochemistry

We helped out with the Genomics Aotearoa "All the small things"  evening - showing off nanopore sequencing and making DNA daquiris! (Photo: Allison Miller)

We have run some fun activities at the Otago Museum, most recently as part of the Genomics Aotearoa summer exhibition ODT links here and here

Many thanks to Graduate Women Otago for supporting Ella Dewar with a summer studentship award to study freshwater sponges across the motu

Congratulations to Hannah, for winning a prize for her poster at the Applied Genomics satellite meeting, QMB!