Prochaine étapes (Next steps)

A fitting poem for the setting sun at Pic du Midi, October 2018.

And so it is even with something as golden as Project PODARCIS. But not to despair! Our team members are going on to do very cool things: Laura working on a tortoise conservation project, Mahaut earning her PhD, and Brooke doing some amazing science back in Virginia. And while I am lamenting the fact that I have only six months left here in France, it is with a great deal of excitement that I can announce what I’ll be doing after that…I got job! And it’s not just any job, but a great position at a small university that seems to be a great fit in so many ways (more on this below).

We’re very proud that Laura will be starting her new position in a conservation project in the south of France, SOPTOM: Station d'Observation et de Protection des Tortues et de leurs Milieux (Station for Observation and Protection of Turtles and their Environment). She will be conducting fieldwork with snakes and tortoises, assisting with conservation efforts, and implementing outreach and education programs. Laura is very excited to get started…and we are very excited to go visit her and see Hermann’s Tortoises (Testudo hermanni) in the wild!

Also, Mahaut has successfully completed her first semester in a PhD program at the University of New Orleans. She is in the lab of Simon Lailvaux, where her work will revolve around how climate change impacts biodiversity, particularly in aspects of ecophysiology with a focus on individual plasticity in these traits.  We are looking forward to hearing more about her exciting work!

And of course Brooke has returned back home after a very successful (and fun!) experiment here in France this past fall. She continues her PhD at Virginia Tech in the lab of Martha Muñoz, where she is doing some super-cool work examining thermal physiology in a variety of lizard species. Very excitingly, Brooke just presented some of her work on the Anolis lizards of Hispañola at the 2019 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Tampa Bay and just had a paper come out in the inaugural issue of the new journal Integrative Organismal Biology! Congrats! We’ve also been unpacking some of the results from the experiment in the fall and will present some updates on that soon (let's just say for now that they are...surprising!).

And finally…in August I’ll start as an Assistant Professor of Zoology with Ohio Wesleyan University! I travelled there for my interview in November and was thoroughly impressed with the University as a whole and the Department of Zoology in particular. It’s a very forward-thinking, progressive institution that I will be proud to be a part of (for example, they recently added a major in Social Justice). And while it is a small, undergraduate-only school they have great support for research and indeed some of the folks there are doing some very cool work.

When I saw the flyers surrounding my 'job talk' poster, I was thrilled with the company I was in! With a bulletin board like this, I know OWU would be a good fit.

Already I’ve been discussing collaboration potential in the area! Specifically, I’m hoping to  get started with Dave Miller at Penn State University, Bill Peterman at the Ohio State University (just down the road in Columbus), and others in the Salamander Population Adaptation Research Collaboration Network (SPARC-net). We will link physiological responses to changing climates to population dynamics and range shifts in the widespread red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus). Also there are box turtles (Terrapene carolina) in the area, which means I can potentially get back to studying my favorite reptile (shhhh…don’t tell the lizards) and how I started this whole career in my first research project.

So while it’s true that nothing gold can stay, it’s spectacular to see how many great folks and talented scientists have crossed paths with this project (and that’s not even mentioning Jérémie, Fabien, or Antonio!).