REBECCA VARNEY - News

Preprint of Chiton Genome Manuscript

5/22/2020

Check out the preprint of our manuscript describing the first-ever sequenced chiton genome!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.102897v1

I am so excited to finally share all of the amazing iron-related discoveries we made, and looking forward to seeing what the data get used for in the future!

Graduate Council Fellowship 2020/2021

4/15/2020

As I move toward completing my PhD this coming year, I realized I forgot to share that I received a second Graduate Council Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year. This fellowship allows me to finish my research without a teaching commitment, and will hopefully allow a few extra projects to come to fruition this next year in addition to my PhD chapters. I am so thankful for the support UA has given me, and continues to offer all of its graduate students. Here's to the home stretch!

Ralph L. Chermock Prize (and a second teaching award!)

4/3/2020

COVID has certainly thrown a wrench in many plans, but I will still share that I received two awards at Honor's Day this year!

The Ralph L. Chermock Prize is named for Dr. Ralph Chermock, professor in Biology and director of the Alabama Museum of Natural History. It is presented to the most outstanding graduate student in systematics and ecology. I am honored to receive it, and grateful to my department for the financial support for research that comes with it!

I was also awarded a second Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student award, this time for Fall 2019. As that is the first semester of student evaluations on record since I returned to teaching after my GCF, I am ecstatic to know that my hiatus from teaching to focus on research did not decrease my effectiveness as an instructor. It was certainly a joy to get back to sharing passion for science with my students.

Meiofauna in Curacao

2/28/2020

This past week I got to visit Curacao for the second time, this time to give a guest lecture on meiofauna to the University of Florida Invertebrate Biodiversity of Coral Reefs class! It was a bit of a trip giving a guest lecture to the professor who taught me Invert, Gustav Paulay!

The students were incredible! They jumped to their dishes of sand with determination, and found some great stuff. Highlight was an undergrad finding a Tubiluchus! I collected chitons, led a chiton dissection, and took members of the class night diving to see bioluminescent ostracods. It was hard to leave!

SICB 2020

1/13/2020

Back from SICB already! As always, SICB was a great week of amazing people doing amazing science. Highlights included a talk in which 3D glasses were put on cuttlefish, and the aplacophoran mini-symposium resulting from Meghan and Kevin giving back-to-back talks.

I presented both a talk on the chiton genome and a poster on chiton radular physiology... on the same day! Which means by 5:30pm on the 5th, I was functionally mute. Wonderful feedback from a supportive scientific community strengthened both projects.

Now I'm back, eager to work toward publishing both, and really genuinely excited about what the future holds.

Science is at its best a group of nerds trying to figure out this crazy world around us. Missing my SICB family already.

LA BioBlitz: On the shoulders of giants (and nerds)

9/2/2019

“There may be explosions next week. And watch out for the raccoon.”

I stand in a musty warehouse on the docks of Los Angeles, in view of cranes and adjacent to water that reflects opalescent colors with skims of oil. Every spigot outdoors warns “do not drink”, and the asphalt floor has been painted and repainted so many times to guide different vehicles that there are practically rainbows … under the grime. This is, in other words, the last place you would expect cutting edge scientific research to take place. And yet that is what we were there to do.

The BioBlitz was an event that brought a team of taxonomists together, experts on different groups of bizarre animals, to catalogue as much of the life in a place as possible. We were marine invertebrate biologists, so we were in LA not for the whales and sea lions but for the strange creatures hiding under the rocks on the shore or in the sands deep in the ocean. Each of us had a group of ocean weirdos that we loved the most, and we were there to share our passion with one another as we chronicled the life that LA’s port coast has to offer. In practice, a BioBlitz is a room full of nerds and geeks talking to crabs and worms the way most people talk to puppies. Heaven, really.

I was thrilled to bring some meiofauna forward from mud samples. The highlight of the experience was showing several scientists their first live specimens of more than one PHYLUM!

Now that I'm home, I have exciting days ahead to make some new kinorhynch slides for my personal collection (oh yes, I have one) and wait for some hand injuries to heal before I can code. :)

Best Talk at World Congress of Malacology!

8/18/2019

Just got back from Monterey, California, where I presented an invited talk in a Utility of Molluscan Genomics session about the genome of my chiton, now approaching publication. And I won a Best Student Talk Award! I'm so excited to see the future of this work in light of the amazing comments from other malacologists!

Happy Birthday, Echinoderes kohni!

6/19/2019

I am SO EXCITED to share that the species description of Echinoderes kohni, the kinorhynch that I found at Friday Harbor Laboratories, is officially published! Manuscript HERE!

The species is named for Alan J. Kohn, the retired UW professor responsible for the Kohn Fellowship, which funded my trip to Friday Harbor in summer 2017 to take Invertebrate Zoology. I am so thrilled that my first species description, something I wanted to do since I was 5, was able to honor somebody who continues to support students.

Even more magical, I was informed that Gustav Paulay, who taught the course along with my coauthor Peter Funch, used my paper in Invertebrate Zoology this week to teach kinorhynchs. That last time Gustav taught that class, I was a student in the process of discovering it! What an incredible full-circle at Friday Harbor Labs!

Joab Langston Thomas Scholarship

4/5/2019

Today I was presented with the Joab Langston Thomas Scholarship. This one-time award is presented to an outstanding graduate student based upon scholarship, creativity, and potential for becoming an outstanding scholar and teacher.

Most importantly, it was an excuse to wear my DNA x-ray crystallography skirt! :-)

Thank you to my department, and congratulations to all students who were honored today!

Visit to USC

3/27/2019

For the past two weeks, I've been up at the University of South Carolina, visiting collaborators Dan Speiser and Alex Kingston. We had a phenomenal time further exploring the radula, and I can't wait to share what we found. Can't wait. Keeping the excitement properly controlled is difficult.

Highlights of USC included: spending time with chiton nerds (obviously!), a giant clam downstairs, and a really cool chiton paper coming out while I was there (check it out). We also got to take some pictures on a VERY nice microscope. More soon!