Located at the Entomology & Nematology Department, University of Florida
2020 lab news:
December 2020: Our experimental evolution project begins!
October 2020: Congratulations to Steve Smit who successfully completed his proposal defense just two months into his M.S. program.
September 2020: A big welcome to James Boothroyd and Steven Smit, new members of the lab.
September 2020: Bon voyage to Dr. Ginny Greenway. Ginny has spent three years in the Miller Lab in Florida and will now take our research on the road. Ginny returns to her home, the United Kingdom. Her first stop once she has completed her quarantine is the University of Cambridge where she will work with Walter Federle on spine and claw biomechanics. Next up is collaborative work at Imperial College with David Labonte on the biomechanics of autotomy.
September 2020: The hidden cost of group living for aggregating juveniles in a sexually dimorphic species, now published!
August 2020: Phylogenomics of the leaf-footed bug subfamily Coreinae (Hemiptera: Coreidae), now published!
August 2020: Dr. Ginny Greenway, a postdoc in the Miller Lab, recently joined the Animal Behavior Society social media team. One of the goals of the team is to provide exposure for early-career animal behavior researchers, and to show the broader scientific and non-scientific community the great research, teaching, and outreach they're doing. If you're an early career researcher interested in opportunities to promote your insect behavior research via ABS Twitter, feel free to get in touch!
July 2020: Drs. Christine Miller and Ginny Greenway helped co-ordinate the Animal Behavior Society 'Weaving the Future of Animal Behavior' 2020 virtual reunion on Monday July 27th. The ongoing 'Weaving the Future of Animal Behavior' initiative is a national NSF-funded program which provides both a community and resources for early career researchers in the field of animal behavior. This year's virtual reunion provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the 50+ program participants, as well as the chance to reflect on the past year's challenges and the role WFAB can continue to play moving forward.
June 2020: Lauren Cirino has successfully defended her dissertation, congratulations! After finishing things up here, she will be off to a postdoc with Rafael Rodriguez in Wisconsin.
June 2020: Dr. Miller spoke on early faculty mentoring at the UF/IFAS Research Forum.
June 2020: One of our papers won the UF/IFAS High Impact Paper Award for 2020. Eight papers were selected for this honor out of the 1,565 papers published by UF/IFAS researchers in 2019. Read more.
May 2020: Congratulations Dr. Ginny Greenway for her Rising Star 2020 award. Dr. Ginny Greenway has been a experiental learning, global learning and virtual exchange trailblazer. We are grateful for her scholarship in both research and teaching, and her willingness to develop and share knowledge of best practices in global learning with the campus at large.
April 2020: Congratulations to undergraduate researchers Emily Angelis, Kayli Sieber, Sierra Shepherd, and Caroline Miller for their poster presentations at the newly virtual University of Florida Undergraduate Research Symposium.
January 2020: Six of us from the lab attended the 2020 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting! Tamsin Woodman, a visiting international scholar, gave a poster presentation on how diet can influence the damage resistance of insect cuticle. Zachary Emberts, a recent Ph.D. graduate, presented on the evolution of autotomy in leaf-footed bugs. Kayli Sieber, an undergraduate researcher, presented on feeding facilitation in the leaf-footed cactus bug, Narnia femorata. Lauren Cirino, a Ph.D. candidate, gave a talk on how weapon damage can influence fitness. Finally, Emily Angelis, an undergraduate researcher, presented her work on the consequences of weapon loss on mating behavior.