Jeff earned his Ph.D. in Alan Tessier's lab at the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, a year-round field station operated by Michigan State University. While there, he waited for many, many Daphnia to die of old age, broke several oars rowing out to the middle of lakes on windy days, discovered the mystic rituals that get PCR to work, and thought that the lab never had enough beakers. He followed that with a post-doctoral project in quantiative genetics and demography (in terrestrial plants, of all things!) with Debbie Roach at the University of Virginia. Needing to get back in the water, he returned to Daphnia with a post-doc in evolutionary genetics and genomics in Mike Lynch's lab at Indiana University. At IU, he launched three sets of mutation accumulation lines, but never managed to accumulate a team of X-Daphnia. He also discovered the ancient Piankashaw rituals for hatching ephippia, and used his knowledge of that closely guarded secret to generate hundreds of hybrids. He now holds a joint appointment in the School of the Environment and Department of Biological Sciences.
Contact Jeff via email: dudycha[at]biol[dot]sc[dot]edu.
Christine, who used to be known as New Kevin, joined the lab after working for a few years in a mouse lab. Before that, she earned an M.S. in marine biology, where she apparently discovered that it’s virtually impossible to test hypotheses about what causes massive echinoderm recruitment in some years. Particularly in years where there's no echinoderm recruitment. This is a variant of Murphy’s Law of Ecologists: the year you plan to do your experiment is the year that everything will be different. Christine is responsible for supervising our live Daphnia operations, solving all sorts of molecular difficulties, and reminding Jeff what the hell he’s supposed to be doing in the lab on any given day. She’s also in charge of stealing lab supplies from the Long lab.
Indhira had a long and distinguished career running a mammalian cell biology lab. When she retired, she realized her life’s work had been unfulfilling, because it had been limited to working on important medical problems, but had never found her true calling: Daphnia. Fortunately, a chance meeting while summiting K2 introduced her to Daphnia world, and she’s currently enjoying a second career as the Wizard of Daphnia Cell Culture. At the helm of our invasion of the Patel Lab, Indhira directs our efforts at generating immortalized Daphnia cells, localizing gene expression, and developing effective transformation protocols. She also brings the best cookies to lab meeting.
Chris joined the lab as a summer undergrad in our REU program, and apparently liked the hullaballoo of that summer enough to want to come back. So now he’s given up his dreams of selling you the best Swingline staplers there are, to realize his vision. His vision of vision. That’s right, he’s pursuing a Ph.D. dissertation on the evolution of vision in Daphnia. Discouraged by his early attempts to teach blind Daphnia braille, he’s now focused on illuminating the intersection of developmental genetics and evolutionary ecology. So that would mean that eco-evo-devo-gen is in his sights. The lab is unsure of whether we can endure four more years of vision-related puns. Chris is also the originator of the Laboratory Haiku Project, and one of our undergraduate alumni.
Peilan dropped from the sky into our lab, having migrated here from the lake district of China with the aid of a Boeing 747. He was waylaid in a cancer genetics lab, lured by the siren song of curing cancer, before he realized that only some people get cancer, but everyone gets older. Plus, he was having trouble making sense of biology until it dawned on him that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. With those realizations, he joined our lab to study the evolutionary genetics of aging. Peilan is currently working on a project that combines molecular evolution of aging-related genes with phenotypic studies in long- and short- lived clones of Daphnia. He is being pursued by agents of the Rapamycin Cartel, but has learned to parry their attacks with Resveratrol.
Mat is an undergraduate who has been studying the population genetic structure of Daphnia obtusa at Congaree National Park. In theory, he is testing whether flooding frequency (and, hence, the opportunity for migration) influences population relatedness in different areas of the park. In practice, he does a lot of troubleshooting, solving problems that were largely created by the PI. But now he’s a microsatellite expert, unfazed by third primers, third alleles, or the third shot of Red Bull that keeps him going at 3 A. M. In his spare time, Mat builds catapults, trains for the World CHOMP! Championships in Johannesburg, and has his picture put up on billboards all over South Carolina.
Andy is fascinated by stem cells. So of course when he was looking for a lab to do research in, he came to us, since freshwater ecologists are well-known for their stem cell expertise. Andy is actually co-advised by Dr. Rekha Patel, who actually is an expert in cell biology, and works closely with Indhira on cell line development. Working primarily with embryonic cells (“primarily,” get it?), We're pretty sure that by now Andy holds the World’s Record for longest-lived Daphnia cell (we’re awaiting official word from Guinness). He’s gotten very good at dissecting Daphnia, and has actually succeeded in getting a part of our lab to be clean enough to do cell biology. He even wears a surgical mask when he’s extracting cells! Outside of the lab, Andy goes fishing a lot, but still hasn’t sampled the Daphnia in the lake he lives on.
Danny had a particularly amazing introduction to ecology and evolution: several weeks in Ecuador, including an expedition to those islands off the coast. Everyone in the lab is jealous, of course. But Danny still came back to work on humble Daphnia. Danny's the only one in the lab who isn't working on North American Daphnia -- he even had to go international for his clones. He's working on figuring out how Finnish and German clones of D. magna differ from each other in their growth and respiration. And his plans for next summer are to head to some remote corner of the world, carrying nothing but a plankton net, pasteur pipette, and some 50 ml tubes.
Madeline survived Jeff's Biol 301 class (Honest! Some of the undergrads really do make it through!) and found that she was interested enough in the juxtaposition of ecology and evolution to join our crew. Working her schedule around the demands of homeownership, Madeline has just started in on a project to compare genes that appear to be differentially expressed between Daphnia pulex and Daphnia pulicaria. Is it an artifact of sequence differences? Is it really an expression difference? Is it a consequence of getting Mowgli wet?
Darius is also a survivor of Jeff's 301 class, and has recently joined the crew on his way to becoming a pharmacist. Seeing as how the FDA approval process for Daphnia drugs is even slower than that for humans, Darius has embraced a comparative project. He's looking at the allometry of eye size in a dozen species of Daphnia to determine whether relative investment in vision has changed over the course of Daphnia divergence. In the course of this project, Darius has photographed hundreds of Daphnia eyeballs, and has hundreds more to go.
Allaina recently responded to our job ad for an Algae God or Goddess. Really, who wouldn't want a job like that? The job primarily involves responding to the entreaties of Ankistrodesmus falcatus for such things as nitrate, potassium, selenium and Vitamin B12. She also makes sure that extraneous algae stay out of our lakewater, and that the good algae are happy. However, there is a dark side to her job. Every day, the Daphnia demand their sacrifice, and Alaina delivers the beautiful greens cells which sustain them, generation after generation after generation.
Kevin joined the lab as a technician after graduating from SUNY-ESF with a degree in conservation biology. After getting caught in one too many Pig Traps (or was it getting caught in Piglet's Graveyard?), he decamped for Texas A&M, where he is pursuing an M.S. in conservation genetics. Or, rather, extermination genetics, since he's actually working on malaria-carrying mosquitoes. He was in charge of the lab's music, which means we listened to a lot of Daft Punk. Now with Christine in his place it seems like there's a lot more Hair Metal. Kevin is a herpetologist at heart, and we never knew what he was going to bring in next. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in slimy or scaly vertebrates in the future.
Jay started working in the lab doing field sampling at Congaree National Park. He ran our demography counts in endless samples from Congaree, and developed GIS maps of our study populations as part of a minor in geography. His main research goal was to describe the demography of Daphnia populations in sections of Congaree National Park with different probabilities of flooding. He is now planning to pursue an MS in Environmental Science, focusing on biogeography.
Christine worked on a project to evaluate molecular evolution of aging-related genes in long- and short-lived Daphnia. The main genes she dealt with include Cheerio, Rpd3, EcR and INDY. You could often find her at the computer patiently phasing her sequences. And when Kevin wasn't paying attention, she changed the music to the Beatles.
Chris joined the lab as part of our REU program in evolutionary biology in the Summer of '08. He worked on a project examining trade-offs in resource exploitation among clones of Daphnia adapted to different resource environments. He will be presenting his research at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology this coming January.
Ed came to us from Vanderbilt University as part of our REU program in integrative evolutionary biology. He worked on a project looking at microsatellite variation in the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora, and braved the famously hot Columbia summer to go cycling when he wasn't in the lab. Ed has since graduated from Vandy and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at the University of Georgia.
Alice joined our group as a part of the REU program in 2009, working to characterize microsatellite differences between Daphnia pulex and D. pulicaria. Somehow, Alice managed to get her PCR reactions to work despite having weirdness in her primers. Alice graduated early from Tulane and is now a post-baccalaureate research intern at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Caitlyn pursued a project in sciences ethics, examing how different approaches to coastal management issues affected different stakeholders. She saw how the same basic problem could play out differently on different coasts, and considered how well scientific information could be drawn from one region an applied to another. She is now pursuing a graduate degree in Marine Policy at Duke University.
Interested in joining us as an undergrad, grad or post-doc?
Some of our amazing ponds and lakes in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Photos of our favorite Daphnia.
Information on clones used by the Daphnia Genomics Consortium
Protocols for Daphnia maintenance and molecular wizardry.