Last month, me and several other members of the Wainwright lab ran an exhibit at UC Davis’s annual Biodiversity Museum Day. At the event, museums across campus are opened to the public so that children and adults can learn about collections at the university (such as the natural history collections at the Museum of Wildlife … More Biodiversity Museum Day

I recently returned from a fieldwork trip to Hidalgo, Mexico. I was there primarily catching leopard frogs to help out some colleagues: Anne Chambers and David Hillis from the University of Texas and Daniel Lara-Tufiño, a Mexican graduate student working with Adrián Nieto at UNAM. Anne and David (along with their Mexican collaborators) are working … More Leopard Frogs and Hidalgo

Just got back from our annual fieldwork trip to the Mojave Desert. We were out working in the desert in California and Nevada for the last two weeks of May. We went to six different sites this year, and for the most part, things went really smoothly. We started this trip spending a couple days … More Mojave Fieldwork 2017

I recently returned from a trip to Mexico City. I was there for a couple weeks, working with my collaborator Adrián Nieto at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). We’re working on trying to finish up a couple manuscripts on the phylogeny of Mexican whiptails. It was a really productive, fun trip, and was … More Mexico Trip

I wrote previously about a project we’d started trying to determine the distribution of snake-eyed skinks on the island of Oahu. This past week, we finished up some additional surveys on several nearshore islands with some interesting results. In collaboration with Megan Laut and Kevin Donmoyer (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), Robert Fisher and Kevin … More Snake-eyed skink surveys II

Maya Shaulsky (an undergraduate in the lab that I have been mentoring for the summer through the NSF REU Site program) finished up her research last week and presented a poster on it at UH. Maya is broadly interested in hybridization, so she’s been working on a project aimed at elucidating the genetic composition of several leopard frog … More Maya presents research at UH

This weekend I attended the 2016 Beckman Symposium, which took place at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. This is the annual gathering of all researchers that are supported by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, through which my … More 2016 Beckman Symposium