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.
Joe in the field in Sumatra with coffee farmers (back row — baseball cap).
A very well done to Joe in being awarded a Texas Tech University Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship. These are brand new fellowships that provide outstanding students full support (so no teaching!) for the final 12 months of their dissertation.
A big thanks to the Graduate School for this new initiative too!
The lab had a great time earlier this month at the 16th IBRC in Costa Rica. Tigga convened a symposium with Richard Stevens entitled “Frontiers in Bat Assemblage Ecology: Novel Perspectives from the Old and New World” and gave a paper in the session (“Spatial analysis of species interactions in diverse assemblages”) as did Maria (“Detection and Characterization of Bat Hotspots: a Fusion Test of Local Spatial Autocorrelation”). Tigga was also involved “Building a Global Network for Bat Conservation Symposium” organized by BCI, with a paper presented by Tammy Mildenstein on the SEABCRU (“The Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit: regional bat conservation exceeding the sum of its parts”)
Julie (“Beyond Size: morphological predictors of bite force in a diverse insectivorous bat assemblage from Malaysia”), Ain (“The interplay between weather and reproduction in three cave-dwelling insectivorous bats in a Malaysian tropical rainforest”) and Joe (“Is bat coffee a potential “wing-wing” tool for biodiversity conservation in Southwestern Sumatra?”) entered the student competition with their presentations and congratulations to Joe on winning the Avinet Award!! Kendra (“Conserving bats in the Philippines: assessing the impact of cave disturbance on bat assemblages”) and Marina (“Mobile transects are more effective at detecting bat passes than stationary points in low bat density landscapes”) both presented in the Ecological Monitoring symposium, and Colleen had a poster entitled “Effectiveness of Operational Mitigation in Reducing Bat Fatalities at the Sheffield Wind Facility, Vermont”. Nick got his first exposure to bat nerds en masse — this was the largest IBRC so far with 650 people.
Other presenters from Dept of Biological Sciences at Tech were: Liz Siles, Cibele Sotero-Caio, Caleb Philips from Dr Baker’s lab, and Dr Carl Phillips.
The lab is very grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Biological Sciences for financial assistance for the grad students’ travel.
From left to right – Colleen, Marina, Kendra, Joe, Julie, Nick, Tigga, Ain
Texas Tech at IBRC
Kingston Lab 