New Mentoring Program for SICB 2024

If you’re planning to go to Seattle in January, please consider signing up for our new DIZ mentoring program!

The program is primarily intended to introduce students new to SICB to the meeting by pairing them with an experienced mentor who can help them strategize how to get the most out of their meeting experience and introduce them to people in their field. A second goal is to increase networking within DIZ and provide broader career advice for all DIZ members. At the moment, we have more mentors signed up than mentees, so students, this means we have lots of senior scientists who really want to meet you and talk with you and help you get the most out of your SICB meeting!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Message from the Chair

Jon Allen, Chair (chair.DIZ@sicb.org)

 Dear DIZ,

Happy Fall! This will be my final (!) message to you as DIZ chair. At the end of the SICB meeting I will be turning the DIZ reins over to Bob Podolsky from the College of Charleston. He will be a fantastic leader for DIZ over the next three years. And yes, I know that technically my term ends 4 weeks after the end of the SICB meeting in accordance with our bylaws update from August of this year. If you also knew that, you may be ready to serve as a DIZ officer! We are always looking for qualified candidates and self-nominations are welcome.

Speaking of candidates for DIZ leadership, this year will mark the 3rd year of Kelly Dorgan’s term as DIZ Secretary. Kelly has agreed to be part of the nominating committee to find her replacement and we’d love to hear ideas from you about who we could ask to serve in that role. At the annual meeting we will be reaching out to many of you directly to ask for input or to inquire about your willingness to serve. As SICB is a scientific family for so many of us, I hope you will consider giving back in this rewarding way.

One of the biggest pieces of business for us this year is deciding how to approach the windfall to the Libbie Hyman fund. I am asking all of you now to begin discussing ideas for how to allocate that money going forward. As I mentioned in the spring newsletter, we have now doubled our ‘target’ goal for the fund and have increased our ability to make awards substantially. Given the relatively vague language surrounding the fund, DIZ has a great deal of latitude in how we decide to use these funds in the future. We will of course continue to award the Hyman Memorial Scholarship for courses and research at field stations (and in fact substantially increase those funds), but the DIZ community will also have the opportunity to come together at this year’s Members Meeting to have meaningful discussions about new ways we can honor Libbie Hyman’s memory and support new discoveries in invertebrate zoology. If you would like to formally suggest ideas for us to consider at the Members Meeting, please send those to me in advance of the gathering in Seattle. DIZ leadership will bring our own ideas, but we would LOVE to hear from you about ways that we might consider best using these funds. It is truly amazing to see the support of our community to honor those who paved the way for the work we do today and to support the next generation of scientists who will follow us. I can’t wait to see you all in Seattle in January!!

Message from the Program Officer

Adam Reitzel, Program Officer (DPO.DIZ@sicb.org)

Hello DIZ!

I am thrilled to share that SICB 2024 in Seattle is quickly approaching! With over 2000 abstracts accepted for the upcoming meeting, we all get to look forward to learning and sharing all of the great science that makes SICB such a wonderful meeting. I have just returned from the weekend meeting of Divisional Program Officers where the schedule was set for each session of talk and poster contributions. So many great abstracts! We also toured the Seattle Convention Center, which will be an excellent venue.

DIZ is supporting two exciting society-wide symposia in January 2024. They are “Convergent Evolution Across Levels of Biological Organization, Organisms, and Time” and “Computational and Physical Models in Research and Teaching to Explore Form-Function Relationships.”  We are also supporting four additional symposiums on “Chordate Origins, Evolution and Development,” “Modeling Organismal Responses to Changing Environment,” “Evolution, Physiology, and Biomechanics of Insect Flight,” and “Immunity in the ‘omics Age: What can ‘omics approaches tell us about immunity in natural systems?” Also, please have a look through the 21 workshops offered at SICB that are great opportunities to learn new techniques, build community, learn about careers, and more.

Aside from attending the symposia, contributed sessions, and workshops, do not forget to support our students by attending the Best Student Talk: Mary Rice Award session on Wednesday morning and the Best Student Poster Presentation: Alan Kohn Award on Thursday afternoon.  Let me take this opportunity to thank all our student members for choosing to present with DIZ and our panel for selecting the eight talk presentation finalists. If you are interested in serving as a judge in the Best Student Presentation competitions, talks and posters, please reach out to me via email (DPO.DIZ@sicb.org).  

 As you plan for your travel to Seattle, please make sure to make time for the division social on the evening of Jan 5! DIZ will be joining with the American Microscopical Society and the Crustacean Society for this event. 

Looking forward to seeing you in Seattle! 

Message from the Secretary

Kelly Dorgan, Secretary (secretary.diz@sicb.org)

Dear DIZ,

First, I’m excited about the new mentoring program that we are starting this year in Seattle and hope many of you will participate (see above). This is something that has been discussed for awhile but was, like so many things, derailed by COVID. Big thanks to Andy Mahon for getting the ball rolling on this. Andy and I are organizing the program and will be pairing mentors and mentees for the Seattle meeting. If you have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions, please reach out to one of us! But most importantly, please sign up! https://forms.gle/Wp7y1Sp1yRj2VjaA9

As Jon said, this will be my last year as DIZ Secretary, and I’m on the nominating committee to find a replacement – if you’re interested in running or know someone who might be interested in running, please let me know!

I hope you enjoy the photos of meiofauna in this Fall’s newsletter – these were taken during the Dauphin Island Sea Lab Meiofauna workshop this past May. Kevin Kocot has run several of these workshops, and Will Ballentine and I got to co-host this one on our backyard. We met an amazing group of people, and had a great time collecting and learning about new critters, and I’m excited to share some of them with you all.

Hope to see you all in Seattle!

Message from the Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Will Ballentine, Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Representative

 Hello DIZ’ers.

It was a hot summer here on the Gulf Coast, but we worked around the weather by hitting the field in the morning and hiding in the lab in the afternoons. I was fortunate enough to spend my summer working with an undergraduate student studying interstitial predation and locomotion. Have you ever seen a gastrotrich glide through the sediment? I worked closely with Clay Bibby, an NSF REU student, who documented all kinds of interesting interstitial behaviors in the gastrotrich Tetranchyoderma. He had never encountered a gastrotrich before starting his REU, but after seeing one beneath the microscope during his first week, he was hooked! It’s always rewarding to see someone find their invertebrate one true love.

We’re hard at work in the SPDAC preparing for SICB 2024. In addition to hosting a job application workshop in Seattle, SPDAC is putting together a comprehensive list of division socials and mentoring programs so that we can assist undergraduate and graduate students in finding the divisional mentoring program that fits them best. I know that our own DIZ leadership has worked hard to develop our new divisional mentor program, and I’m looking forward to highlighting it at our next SPDAC meeting. Finally, if you’re bringing new students to SICB 2024, please encourage them to attend the new student orientation or put them in touch with me and I’d be happy to bring them along. The SPDAC believes that attending the new student orientation dramatically improves student involvement throughout the entire meeting, and we would love to see attendance increase.

See you Seattle!

 

Message from the Libbie Hyman Scholarship Selection Committee Chair

Abigail Cahill, Libbie Hyman Scholarship Selection Committee Chair

Hello fellow invertebrate-lovers! I’m here with your Libbie Hyman Scholarship updates, including a summary from this year’s amazing winner.

The Libbie H. Hyman Award provides funding to support the first significant field station experience for advanced undergraduates or early career graduate students pursuing coursework or research on invertebrates.  This first field station experience is typically a transformative period in the career and life of a student. Field station costs are ever-higher, and the scholarship makes a real difference to students.

As Jon shared in our spring newsletter, the fund recently got a very large windfall in the form of two generous bequests from Drs. Margaret Simpson and Mary Rice, which will enhance our ability to fund student work. We also appreciate your continued support of the fund. If you would like to make a contribution, click on ‘Donate to SICB’ on the SICB home page (http://sicb.org) or send a check to the address below. All contributions are tax deductible.

SICB Business Office
Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship Fund
950 Herndon Parkway
Suite 450
Herndon, VA 20170 USA

Please encourage eligible students to apply for the scholarship! After a very large pool of applicants in 2022, we had a much smaller pool in 2023. The deadline for 2024 is February 12, and the application is online at https://sicb.org/libbie-h-hyman-memorial-scholarship/. If you or your students have questions about the application process, please feel free to contact me via email (my address is available at that site).

I have gotten questions over the last couple of years regarding timing of the application, noting that the deadline is before the deadline for many summer courses. However, having gone through the whole cycle a few times now, a February deadline is what we need to review applications, coordinate with recipients, and get the funds distributed in a manner that is both timely and useful to the recipients to pay for their proposed courses or projects. My advice to students still working on their summer plans, but who are considering work that would be fundable by the Hyman, is to send us an application! (Give us work to do – we like reading your proposals!)

Now, here is the report from our 2023 scholarship recipient, in her own words. Thank you all again for contributing to her research experience this summer.

Libbie Hyman Scholarship Awardee for 2023

Leeza-Marie Rodriguez, University of California at Santa Barbara

The Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship allowed me to experience conducting research at a research station for the first time in my academic career. I took the five week research intensive Larval Biology Course at Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL). Taking this course was life changing, and one of the best research experiences of my life. The welcoming research environment and people I met at FHL allowed me to fully immerse myself into the world of larval biology.

As a now second year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my motivation to take this course was to strengthen my background in larval biology studies. During the five week course we attended lectures and discussions learning about the different larval constraints, mechanisms, and physiology needed to survive in their environment in their more vulnerable life stage. We also conducted two research projects from the inception of a question to a fully written manuscript and presentation on any type of larvae of our choosing. For the first project, I chose to study the impacts of ocean acidification on the settlement behavior of the Plate Limpet, Lottia scutum. For the second project, I chose to study the impacts of marine heatwaves on the early life stages of the Ochre Sea Star, Pisaster ochraceus, by exposing them to an acute heat shock and assessing their thermal tolerance. Both of these projects allowed me to study the impacts of anthropogenic climate events on ecologically important marine invertebrates.

In addition to adding more research skills to my belt, I had the chance to meet students and professors/researchers from all around the world. This was such a great opportunity to both network and make lifelong friendships while being in such a positive scientific environment. The friends and professors/researchers I had the privilege and opportunity to meet is one of the many reasons why my time at FHL was so precious and life changing. Whether it was through simply attending guest lectures, looking at sea critters in tidepools, eating together at the dining hall, or star gazing, I am so lucky to have made these connections and I will always cherish them.

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude for this opportunity to study larval biology at Friday Harbor Laboratories that would not have been possible without support from the Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship. It has been a privilege to learn more about larvae and be able to apply it to my dissertation research at my home institution. This incredible experience has provided me with critical thinking, problem solving, and research skills that are vital for a successful career in research. I will cherish and use everything I’ve learned for the rest of my career.