STUDENT NEWS continued
Graduate Students Excel with Grants and Pubs
Cristol’s Students Publish Without Him!
    Dan Cristol brings news of our graduate students:
“I am not aware of many graduate-student-only articles occurring in our department, so this seems noteworthy.  Our graduate students are really outdoing themselves - three have gotten grants this year…and now they are publishing on their own.  Published in a journal that features methodological advances, their paper describes a new technique they devised for catching birds in birdhouses.

   “The story behind their invention is that Rebecka Brasso was having trouble catching the more wary male tree swallows.  Scott Friedman rigged up a modification of her technique.  Anne Condon, Rebecka and Scott used it very successfully all summer and the rest of us have been using it since.  Now everyone in the country can benefit from their inventiveness.  A reviewer called it ‘ingenious’.  That's the story.  Anne did the illustration.”

Three Biology Graduate Students Funded

    Three graduate students have been given grants , based on proposals they wrote, to fund their research this year.

Jonathan Holley and Megan Rook at the recent department celebration of Charles Darwin's Birthday

   Jonathan Holley received $15,400 from the Virginia Environmental Endowment to study the effectiveness of current storm water management practices, and Ryan Burdge was awarded $27,500 by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to study the effects of golf course pesticides on bluebird. Most recently, Megan Rook received $20,000 from NOAA and the National Estuarine Reserve to study diamond back terrapins in Chesapeake Bay.