Emily's paper, Genital morphology and allometry differ by species and sex in Malawi cichlid fishes, was published in Hydrobiologia. In addition to being a nice comparative study of sexual dimorphism in genital morphology, it also provides techniques to determine the sex of live cichlids with external examination. Congrats!

We welcome April Bernier, 2016 Kenan Fellow and a teacher at Johnston County Early College Academy in Smithfield, NC. She'll be working closely with Ashley in the lab, helping out with our sex determination research while also helping to develop new educational modules linked to our work. We look forward to a fun month together, and a lasting relationship with April and her classes!

Kaitlyn graduated with her B.S. in Genetics, and we are extremely excited that she'll be staying in the lab for a while!

The Roberts Lab was well-represented at Brain Awareness Night at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. Emily gave an amazing lay talk on cichlid behavior, and Emily, Erin, and Kaitlyn unveiled their new interactive exhibit, "Dances with Fishes". Museum goers were treated to dance lessons as a way to link animal behavior as communication, and introduce the idea that fish behavior isn't all that different from human behavior. Lots of fun and positive feedback!

Congratulations to Jodie, who will be starting at Johns Hopkins University in the fall, in the graduate program in Genetic Epidemiology.

Major congratulations to Ashley for being awarded a two-year NSF post-doctoral fellowship. Her proposed research will explore the epigenomic landscape arising from polygenic sex determination, and involve some of the first epigenetic experiments in cichlids.

Congrats to Nishi Shah for being selected for a Comparative Medicine Institute undergraduate research fellowship. She will be working across our lab and Dr. Lisa McGraw's lab to explore the vole vaginal microbiota.