I’m a little tardy in writing this, but our lab has a few pieces of stellar news from the last couple of weeks. First off, the most exciting:

Photo from Stephanie Rosales

Meet the man formerly known as Mr. Rory Welsh. He will now be referred to as Dr. Rory Welsh. Or, more likely, still just Rory. This guy is one of the most humble and most awesome guys around. Since he successfully defended his PhD dissertation last week, he is now also formally recognized as an expert in our field, and the foremost expert in his particular corner of it. I know I speak for our whole lab and many others when I say congratulations – you deserve it.

In the course of our tenure as PhD students, we must take classes, teach classes, perform research, and share that research through a number of public presentations. And, most importantly, we must make some verifiable contribution to the collective knowledge of our field. Which brings me to the other fun lab news. During Rory’s dissertation defense preparation, he wrapped up a couple of projects and wrote multiple papers. One was accepted to the influential ISME Journal and became available online just before his defense. Another (which was co-authored by a certain blogging scientist we all know…), he recently submitted to the open-access journal PeerJ and is undergoing the review process. Though it hasn’t yet been accepted, the pre-print also became available online last week. Both of these papers deal with the fascinating ecology of a particular coral-associated bacterial predator called Halobacteriovorax. I could tell you more about it, but I think it’d be best to hear that story straight from the Doctor’s mouth. Rory will tell you about them, soon!

Last week also saw the publication of yet another paper from the lab! Stephanie, who has previously written a post for the blog, had her paper published on the metagenomics of seal brains! It’s available now at another open-access journal, PLOS ONE. Stephanie is also working on a blog post talking about that paper.

Whew! The rest of the lab’s been quite prolific. I definitely feel like I need to step up my game…