Two celebrations!

Both to do with Hanna’s Finnish cultural award; we needed to do something outdoorsy so that we’re not too cultural all the time. First, we dragged ourselves all the way up Pilatus from lake level. Isobel got to do her marmot face selfie and we all got rather sweaty. The following weekend was less sweaty but no less fun – rafting down the Rheinschlucht, but no selfies or any other photo evidence survived.

 

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Special Topic Network – sex and local adaptation

Together with Erik Svensson (Lund), Florence Débarre (Paris) and Tim Connallon (Monash, Australia), we got multi-year funding for an ESEB Special Topics network. We will be running workshops for students and researchers around the topic “Linking local adaptation with the evolution of sex differences”. That’s fantastic news, now we have to figure out what the first concrete thing will be!

Finnish cultural foundation award

This Finnish prize for significant cultural achievement is awarded once a year and – guess what:
Hanna Kokko is one of this years recipients of the award!

Congratulations from the whole team, that’s really great!!!

By the way, from a reliable source we know that the national anthem was compulsory. It’s not easy to stand next to a famous rapper, sing the national anthem, not really remembering the lyrics…

Find some impressions, here (in Finnish).
Or at least a tiny bit about it in English.

Lab retreat and giant insects…

In February we started a hopefully long-lived tradition of exploring mountainous areas with Tanja Schwander’s group (they do very cool stuff in Lausanne). We exchanged a lot of protocols (e.g. versatile uses of mushrooms, spinach etc.) and proceeded to build a giant snow invertebrate of somewhat uncertain taxonomic identity.