Congratulations to Environmental Science PhD student Jeremy Heath for successfully defending his thesis this week!! Jeremy’s thesis, “Assessing the drivers of adaptive radiation in a complex of gall midges: A multitrophic perspective on ecological speciation,” took about a ream of paper to print out, and that was leaving out a lot of data and experiments that did not make the cut. Three of the chapters are already published or in press (see previous post), and I believe the two final chapters will be his biggest papers yet! Go Jeremy!

The day after Jeremy’s successful defense, Masters student Dan Davis defended his thesis research on “The phylogenetic relationships of Tachinidae (Insecta:Diptera) with a focus on subfamily structure.” This work is a big reason why our proposal to analyze the phylogeny of World Tachinidae got funded. Dan did a bang-up job with both the written and oral components. His presentation was especially well delivered (and he looked pretty damn sharp with that tie and sport jacket). Congratulations Dan!!