Whew, what a year! Over 1200 bats, 14 conference presentations, eight published papers, four countries, one coup, one visiting scholar, and a baby. Here’s to keeping it up in 2025!
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Lots of familiar faces of past and present lab members at NASBR 2024! Despite some technical difficulties, Ben presented his talk “Taste, Influence, and Availability: the Key Factors driving Bat Meat Consumption”. Ben’s talk showed that bat meat consumption is driven by an interplay of multiple socio-cultural factors rather than just economics. These findings underscore the importance of structuring conservation and public health interventions to more integratively target all drivers of behavior concern. Abby won the Luis F. Bacardi Bat Conservation Award for her talk “Bat Hunting in Sub-Saharan Africa: Mapping the Distribution of a Conservation-Relevant Human Behavior Using Hypothesis-Driven Models”, which was full of stats, bats, and maps (three of her favorite things!). Former lab post doc Maria Sagot encouraged her fellow bat scientists to join EchoMap, a collaborative global effort to increase capacity-building for bat acoustic monitoring resources. Learn more about EchoMap here. And of course, everyone had a great time at the banquet!
Abby and Touseef were both recognized at the 2022 Texas Tech Graduate Awards Luncheon. Touseef was recognized for his Graduate Student Research Support award and Abby for her GRFP. Congratulations guys!
A huge congratulations to Tigga for receiving the 2021 President’s Excellence in Diversity and Equity Award, this award was received due, “to advancing diversity and promoting equity and inclusive excellence at Texas Tech”. There are four recipients of the award out of the pool of all Texas Tech staff, faculty, and students.
View the details of the President’s Excellence in Diversity and Equity Award here.
We are excited to share that Touseef’s poster entitled “Regional and Intersectional Gaps in One Health Research: Future Directions” has won an Outstanding Student Poster Award at the World Microbe Forum, the world’s leading platform for microbiologists. This award is presented jointly by American Society for Microbiologist (ASM) and Federation of European Microbiologist Societies (FEMS). One of only fourteen winners (out of over three thousand submissions), Touseef will present the poster this week in a special session for award winners.
A great week for Iroro! First she won the Karl Koopman Award for a Student Oral presentation at the 49th North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) meeting in Kalamazoo. Her talk was entitled “Competitors Versus Filters: Drivers of non-random Structure in Forest Interior Insectivorous Bat Assemblages along Elevational Gradients”.
Icing on the cake came from placing third in TTU’s “Three-Minute Thesis” competition
https://www.depts.ttu.edu/gradschool/current/threeminutethesis.php
I was deeply honored to receive the Gerrit S. Miller, Jr Award from the North American Society for Bat Research at NASBR’s annual conference last week. The award is in recognition of “outstanding service and contribution to the field of chiropteran biology”. I am the 26th awardee in the Society’s 47-yr history, so it is very special to me!
The newest Miller Awardee about to be photobombed by one of the oldest (Roy Horst)
The fabulous plaque!
One of the best bits of the award is the complex conspiracies that go on to keep it a secret from the recipient until “the big reveal” at the conference banquet. Thank you to all the co-conspirators for making it so special — you know who you are!!!
Congratulations to Marina for being award the joint First Prize for an oral presentation in Ecology at this year’s TTABS. Her presentation was entitled “Spatial Clustering and Bias in Southeast Asian Bat Sampling Localities”. Cody McIntire did a great job presenting in the Undergraduate Category “The Diversity of Distress Vocalization of Old World Tropical Bats” and Iroro closed out the day with “High Roost Fidelity of Hammer-headed Fruit bats, Hypsignathus monstrosus, Utilizing a Man-Made Day Roost in Southern Nigeria.
Congratulations to Kendra for being awarded a Texas Tech University Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This means she is fully supported to do nothing but think science and write up her research for 12 months! How cool is that!
Well done to Joe in securing a travel grant to go toward the cost of attending the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation meeting in Cairns this month. He will be giving a talk entitled “ROOSTING AND TROPHIC ENSEMBLES OF BATS RESPOND DIFFERENTLY TO COFFEE AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA”. We look forward to hearing more about the meeting, as the only representative from the lab going.
Kingston Lab 