Last month, KU Mammalogy toured the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, which supported the development of the museum's 5th floor exhibit. The team saw captive-bred ferrets preparing to be released into the wild & Elizabeth Ann — the first black-footed ferret clone!

Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship apps are open! The world needs more passionate, brilliant, motivated conservationists. Happy to support mammal applications (and tangentially support others)

Hi people. I have a newly updated pre-print on ancestral state reconstruction that I'd love for you to check out. github.com/liamrevell/Rev… 1/5

New paper on the bacteria Erysipelothrix that has been associated with muskoxen die-offs. In this study, grad student Vineesha Seru characterises the genome of bacteria from recent outbreaks and investigated virulence traits. link.springer.com/article/10.118…

Out in Journal of Animal Ecology, we investigate the influence of masting on timing of reproduction in small mammals using a 12-year dataset. Seed availability alters probability of reproduction for both sexes and can change timing of reproduction by over 2 months! besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/13…

Looking forward to digging into our historical collections with these new methods 😍 #collectionsAreEssential

KU is recruiting NIH IRACDA Postdoctral Research Fellows (details: iracda.ku.edu) to start ASAP. If you're interested in zoonotic virus discovery and linked-evolutionary dynamics of mammals and their parasites/pathogens lemme know. Please share!

First half of the lab's Great Northern expedition complete ✅ Rain or shine this team -- PhD student Ben Wiens, Curator Jocelyn P. Colella, Postbacc Bailey Dixon, and Masters student Alex Hey -- surveyed small mammal hybrid zones along the Cassiar Hwy of British Columbia Canada.

Out in MER! 𝑚𝑎𝑝𝑁𝑁: a SNP-based inference tool for estimating geographic maps of population density and dispersal, by Chris Smith Gilia Patterson Peter Ralph Andrew Kern. Wiley Ecology & Evolution Read more: buff.ly/3X652Pj

Smith Fellowship applications for 2025 close on September 30th! All materials must be submitted by the 11:59 pm ET deadline. Reach out to [email protected] with any inquires.

Our lab is recruiting masters/PhD students to join our group for Fall 2025. Please share! More information at katyamack.com/join-the-lab.h…

Teach your students about equity and vector-borne disease with our placed-based lessons (out as a pre-print as of yesterday!) JordanSalomon Francisco Ferreira Julia González Yuexun Tian Sarah Poor SSRN papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

The first chapter of my dissertation is available on bioRxiv. We resequenced genomes of all species (& subspecies) of rapidly radiating genus of Indo-pacific kingfishers. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…