Upcoming conferences and talks

I am off to a fast start here in Fort Collins, but I am looking forward to the new experiences.  I just registered yesterday to attend and present a talk at the Guild of Rocky Mountain Ecologists and Evolutionary Biologists (GREEBs) in about a month.  This is a meeting that several members of the Ghalambor lab attend, and it brings together a wide range of local researchers from Colorado and Wyoming.  The location is also fantastic - in the Rocky Mountains when the leaves are changing! This will be a great opportunity to talk about my research to a new audience and meet other local scientists!

Also, thanks to Tim Higham for inviting me to give a symposium talk at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in West Palm Beach, FL this January.  The symposium is co-organized with Peter Wainwright, and is titled "New insights into suction feeding biomechanics and evolution".  Not only am I excited to give an integrative and forward thinking talk on complexity and integration, but Tim and I are also working on submitting a complementary review paper to go with it.  This will be a great opportunity to get some of my ideas out and share them with lots of other researchers!

CSU

I have officially arrived in Fort Collins, CO (although I don't technically start the fellowship until Sept. 1)!  I really enjoyed spending time with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law on the drive out!  We stopped in Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and the Continental Divide (NM).  I think we may have been the only ones with a rabbit at the Grand Canyon! But it was too hot to leave the boys in the car.  

Diego (dog) and Bruce (bunny) at the Grand Canyon!

I haven't had much time to settle in though, because a few days after I arrived my dad came to town in his RV.  So of course we took the obligatory road trip to get to know my new home state.  We drove through Rocky Mountain National Park where we saw pika, marmot, and elk and evaded a thunderstorm.  Then we Parked the RV at Cheyenne Mountain State Park and took the motorcycle to Pike's Peak and Mt. Evans, where it snowed both times!  We also saw a bighorn sheep and several herds of mountain goats.  On the way back home we stopped at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings to see the ruins.  See more photos here.  I guess now that I've been introduced to Colorado, it's time to get to work!

Mountain goat selfie!