Grad Appreciation Night and EEB colloquium

Incomplete Rowe Lab (from left to right): Our Leader Locke, myself, Min and Inga....missing member: Sean on the other side, Cait at the other table, and Jen in BC

Last weekend..... We had our annual two-day departmental colloquium and Grad appreciation night.

The departmental colloquium gave an opportunity for everyone from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to find out what their fellow researchers are working on. Min proudly represented my current lab and Paul proudly represented my original lab. They both did an excellent job with their presentation!!! Our invited speakers also gave some extremely interesting talks.

I love Dr. Jonathan Shurin (UBC) talk on trophic ecology of freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems. It was interesting to see comparison among these three types of ecosystems. As my friend Meg has perfectly put it "Dr. Shurin is a true community ecologist trying to answer broad scale question"

Dr. Daniel Pauly (UBS) was our Atwood lecture speaker and his topic was " Impact of fisheries and global warming on marine ecosystems and food security". He has published in a number of world renounced top scientific journals (e.g. Nature and Science). In his talk, he suggested that all fishing practices currently found around the world are not sustainable and what we are doing right now to try to raise awareness (e.g. Green labeling, conservation zoning) is too slow and ineffective. He proposed that a social movement is required and we, as global citizens, should push our governments to make drastic changes with current policy.

I can definitely see the need of that, but I also believe good science has to meet with reality in order to get the idea forward.........I think individual efforts should not be discounted and is necessary. Anywaz, I can go on and on about this.........so I should just stop here......


Another highlight of the day was the Grad Appreciation Night where the supervisors (PI) treat their grad students to a nice dinner :)...... and another proud moment was Jen from our lab got the grad student award (i.e. the best PhD student of the year!!!)

Ok this post is getting too too long...... I should just start posting pictures

Min really loves her beer!!!

What is wrong, Min? You don't like my camera?

I am still not sure what Min is up to :)

Incomplete Rodd lab (from left to right): Anna, her leader Helen, and ex-Rodd member Sean with crazy hair (Yeah his life history is complicated :P)

Smart people engaging in serious topic

Proof of Aneil being nice to his student



Locke is shocked!!! About what though?