Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
The Christmas decorations have been banished for another year, stashes of left-over turkey are dwindling and the hollow echo of empty biscuit boxes tone the end of holiday indulgences. As the promise of ever-longer evenings beckons and the first, brave (or fool hardy) snowdrops contemplate their next move it’s that time for the inevitable “year …
It’s that time of year again at EcoEvo@TCD where we start looking for people to apply for Irish Research Council fellowships to come and join us as postdocs or PhD students. These awards are open to anyone, regardless of nationality. Details can be found here(PhD funding) and here (postdoc funding). But why would you want to …
On Friday the 27th of September, as part of the Discover Research Night we opened the doors of the department to the public. We decided that since we have a museum full of some really cool stuff, we could use it to demonstrate some of the research in the department. Since the research night had …
There’s an international celebrity star of the Victorian age directly above my office. He’s lived there long enough to see his museum home gradually shrink around him to such an extent that he no longer fits out the door. He will spend the rest of his days eavesdropping on undergraduate lectures, seminar presentations and …
Following the excellent Botany/Zoology postgraduate symposium in TCD a couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion in NERD club about giving scientific presentations – what makes a good one, what makes a bad one and which were the best in the symposium? Actually, we didn’t do the last bit, and scarily I could remember …
“I wish to register a complaint…” the first six months of my PhD have passed by far too quickly. As the date of departure for my first major data collection trip looms, I’m navigating the exciting but unnerving transition from the planning to action stages of my project. Fortunately the members of NERD club were on hand …
Continue reading “Morphological convergence and disparity in Malagasy tenrecs”
At a recent session of NERD club, our weekly research group meeting for the Networks in Ecology/Evolution Research Dynamic, we discussed academic CVs. Four academic staff members (including myself) showed their CVs to the group and discussed what was in them. This was interesting because we all had such varied opinions! I thought I’d write …
For the longest time floral nectar was considered to be made of two components: simple sugars (such as sucrose, fructose and/or glucose) and water. Research carried out in the past two decades however has repeatedly shown this paradigm to be incorrect. As analytical techniques such as high resolution GC-MS and HPLC have become commonplace, the …
Continue reading ““Toxic” nectar and pollen in an invasive plant species”
So for various reasons, one of which was being unsure of whether a PhD was for me, I found myself asking to work as an Intern with the good people in the Zoology Department at TCD. To give you a bit of background, I am a Zoology graduate with an MSc in Marine Biology, so …
Reflections on geeking it up at Intecol 2013 by Jane Stout Having not been to a 2000+ delegate, multi-session, international conference for several years, I was a bit nervous in the run up to INTECOL2013 “Into the next 100 years: advancing ecology and making it count” – would it be possible to see all the talks, …