Today, I am very pleased to welcome Rachel Bonner to the Bagley Lab. Welcome Rachel!
Rachel is a junior here at JSU and is from Southside, AL. She was one of the nicest, smartest, most committed students in my Ecology course this past Fall semester, which had a CURE laboratory focused on ecological niche modeling (ENM) of Alabama’s coastal dune plant species.
Rachel’s ENM work over the past several months has focused on a perennial creeping plant from Araliaceae, Hydrocotyle bonariensis, which is found in both the foredune and backdune zones and has been shown to be locally adapted. This species is found along coastlines worldwide, including those of our focus area: the Northern Gulf of Mexico. Rachel and other students working with me showed that ENMs predict that suitable habitat for this species is expected to decline precipitously over the next 50 years (by 2070), and our results for H. bonariensis appear to be generalizable to the foredune plant community.
Rachel will be traveling with me to the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in New York City in February to presenting the results of her work on Hydrocotyle. We are so proud of her!
It is so great to have Rachel continuing her journey as a scientist in my lab.
~J
This month, we welcomed two new undergraduate students to our group: Macee Glick and Kayla Morrow. Macee and Kayla are both undergraduate students and Alabama natives, and they are interested in learning more about the research we do and what is involved in the process of science from our viewpoint.
Currently, they are participating in lab meetings and assisting with ongoing projects/project development. In lab meetings, we are reading about genomic reduction methods for NGS (e.g. ddRAD-seq, DArT-seq) and empirical applications of these methods to address questions in population genomics and phylogeography.
It is great to have them starting their journeys in science with us and thinking about these methods. So, welcome to Macee and Kayla!
~J
I am pleased to welcome to the Bagley Lab my first Master’s student, Christian Braswell, who just joined our group in August.
Christian comes to us from Mike Sandel’s LAQE lab group at UWA, where he worked on several projects in fish phylogeography and DNA barcoding and directed the outreach program for the lab. In the Bagley Lab, he’ll be working on conservation genomics of Alabama’s threatened and endangered minnow species.
~J
The Bagley Lab is now officially open for business!
Just recently, during Summer semester (June) of 2021, I formally received my lab space in Rm 103 of the McGee Science Center at Jacksonville State University (JSU). See the Contact page for additional details on our location and how to contact me.
~J