Hopkins Lab postdoc Patrick McKenzie, may have stumbled upon a long-lost species while using the iNaturalist app late one night. Intrigued by a mysterious plant specimen found in the forests of Durango, Mexico, McKenzie believes it could be Monarda mexicana, a species not documented since 1952. His findings could add a crucial piece to the puzzle of the ongoing “species problem,” potentially redefining how we understand biodiversity in a rapidly changing world. Read more about it here.

Cheers to Andrea and Robin for their new paper out in Frontiers in Plant Science journal. The paper discusses the North American red-flowering Silene. Check it out here!

Anna completes three weeks of fieldwork on perennial Phlox in the Midwest

The lab hosts two amazing Darin Butz summer interns, Olivia and Josh! Olivia is exploring plant-pollinator interactions with Grace and Josh is working on phenotypic variation of hybrids

Bridget is awarded a Putnam Grant from the Harvard University Herbaria for Phlox summer fieldwork

Cheers to Robin on her new paper published in Ecology and Evolution, which discusses her predictions on pollinator behavior causing reproductive isolation. Check it out here!

Cheers to Robin and her collaborators for their new paper out in Annals of Botany, which discusses how hybridization and introgression are prevalent in Southern European Erysimum (Brassicaceae) species. Check it out here!

Dr. Ben Goulet-Scott defends his dissertation. Congrats, Ben!

We are excited to welcome Isabel Acevedo to the lab! Isabel will be working in the lab as a lab technician. We are excited to have her become part of the our lab family!

The lab receives a NIH R35 MIRA Grant to study the genetic and genomic basis of reinforcement !!

Congrats to Robin on wining the Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in teaching undergraduates

Austin receives the SICB Graduate Student Grant-in-Aid of Research Award!

Congratulations to Meghan Blumstein for her successful thesis defense on August 6th, 2020, entitled “The plastic and adaptive potential of sugar storage in temperate trees under climate change”. Meghan has been awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship (Plant Genome Initiative) and will be heading to MIT to work with David Des Marais on her project, “Untangling the environmental and genetic drivers of phenological timing in red oak (Quercus rubra) to improve climate predictions”. Great work, Meghan, and congratulations!

Congrats to postdoc Samridhi Chaturvedi for her new publication in Nature Communications! The paper, “Recent hybrids recapitulate ancient hybrid outcomes” is based on work with Lycaeides butterflies that Samridhi completed as part of her PhD in Zachariah Gompert’s lab at Utah State University.

Congrats to Bridget Bickner for being recognized with an honorable mention from the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program!

A big congratulations to Robin, who has been promoted to Associate Professor!

We’re thrilled to welcome another new postdoc to the lab, Dr. Antonio Serrato-Capuchina. Antonio joins the Hopkins Lab after completing his PhD in Prof. Daniel Matute’s lab at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studied the role of transposable elements in speciation.

Congratulations to (former) lab tech Matt Farnitano, who is starting a PhD at University of Georgia with Dr. Andrea Sweigart. The lab has not imploded in his absence… yet.

Congratulations to (former) graduate students Franchesco and Shayla on graduating! Shayla will start a postdoc at Cornell with Dr. Chelsea Specht and Dr. Rob Raguso, and Franchesco is off to start a faculty position at Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.

Robin is awarded a grant to study pollen-pistil interaction in Phlox through the NSF Plant Biotic Interactions program.

Robin, Austin, and Ben attend the Gordon Conference on Speciation in sunny Ventura, CA. Great meeting and great community!

Congratulations to Franchesco for his publication on climatic niche expansion in an autopolyploid! Read it here

Congratulations to Sevan, whose paper on reproductive isolation and reinforcement in Phlox is out in Evolution! You can find her paper here (and you can find her in a faculty position at the University of San Francisco!)

Federico’s paper on the correlation between self- and interspecific- incompatibilities in Phlox drummondii is online for early view in New Phytologist! Read the paper here!

Graduate students Ben Goulet and Austin Garner, along with research technician Matt Farnitano, have been hard at work planting and collecting Phlox species in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Midwest.

Field team poses with their gardens

Common garden experiment at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area

Cuttings transplanted to the field

Phlox amoena (Hairy phlox) field site

Robin gets her hands dirty planting cuttings

Phlox subulata (moss phlox) found in the field by Austin

View from the field station in Livingston, Illinois.

Purple and white flowers in a population of Phlox bifida (cleft phlox).

Congratulations to Ben Goulet, who has received a 2018 Graduate Research Excellence Grant, the Rosemary Grant Advanced Award, from the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). This award is meant to help Ph.D. candidates expand the scope of their research projects. You can read more about the award here.

Congratulations to Dr. Callin Switzer on the publication in The American Naturalist of his paper on explosive pollen dispersal in mountain laurels! You can read about the study in the Harvard Gazette here, or find the original publication here.

Congratulations to Shayla for winning the E. Arthur Bell Prize for significant achievement as a student in the study of the nonprotein amino acid BMAA for her poster “Assessing the potential for bacterial degradation of BMAA in the guts of cycad-feeding insects” at the 2017 International BMAA Conference in Salt Lake City.

Adrian Hopkins Desmarais is the lab’s newest member!

Sevan Suni accepted a position at the University of San Francisco, in San Francisco CA.  She will join the biology department as a tenure track assistant professor in January 2018. She is looking forward to teaching courses in field ecology and evolution, and to continuing research on the evolutionary ecology of plants and their pollinators.

Ben successfully defended his dissertation proposal on a putative case of homoploid hybrid speciation in the Phlox pilosa complex.

Robin and Federico get a Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship award for continuing their work on self-incompatiblity and heterospecific incompatibility.

Heather and Robin’s work on pollinator behavior is the focus of the latest episode of Science IRL. Science IRL is a YouTube series hosted by Molly Edwards, a graduate student in Harvard OEB, that shows what life as a researcher is really like by featuring the work of scientists from around the country. Check it out!

Heather’s baby, Larrea, is born on New Year’s Eve!

We are so thrilled that Ben will be joining the lab this fall as a graduate student in OEB.

Chris Chen has been awarded a PRISE fellowship to work in the lab this summer. He will be studying the strength of reproductive isolating barriers in the Texas Phlox.

The Hopkins Lab was awarded a Milton Fund grant. This award will support our work investigating how and why butterflies are behaving the way they do while foraging on Phlox. We will be investigating if pollinators learn and how this learning influences pollen movement and speciation in Phlox.

Sevan Suni joins the lab. Sevan joins the lab as a postdoctoral fellow and will be investigating the genetics of reinforcement and the role of hybridization in adaptive introgression.

Welcome to the world Riley Hopkins Desmarais!

As a postdoc in the lab, Federico will be investigating the genomic signatures of reinforcement and the evolution of self-incompatibility.