I encourage students to take advantage of the resources available in the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas (http://www.nhm.ku.edu/) and as a museum biologist, I am enthusiastic about working with students in all aspects of specimen-based research and studies that involve biodiversity, systematics, and evolution.

Molecular Facility: The recently re-tooled Molecular Phylogenetiuc Laboratory (MPL) in Dyche Hall is a well-equipped shared facility for students interested in incorporating molecular biology into their own research. Currently this facility is used most heavily by graduate students in Herpetology, Ichthyology, Ornithology, and Entomology. In addition to a fully equipped molecular laboratory facility (take tour here), we have our own ABI 3130xl 16-capillary automated DNA sequencer and (new for 2009!) recently we acquired a state-of-the-art ABI 3730 48-capillary instrument. Persons with questions related to use of the MPL or DNA sequencing resources at KU should contact the director of the MPL Users' Committee, Dr. Rob Moyle (moyle at ku.edu).

Collections: The KU herpetology collections are the fifth largest in the United States and the world's largest collection of neotropical amphibians and reptiles. At approximately 320,000 specimens, nearly 50% of reptile and amphibian species worldwide are represented in the collection. The collection includes 575 holotypes, >14,500 parartypes, 8,000 skeletons (including the world's largest collection of anuran skeletons), an extensive collection of amphibian larvae and eggs, 2,000 recordings of anuran vocalizations, and 12,500 color transparencies (see Division website, here).

Computational Resources: The University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at Dyche Hall currently has two High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters available for scientific analysis and research: the "BRC Compute" and the "Phyllomedusa" clusters.

The BRC Compute Cluster is built from 64 hyperthreaded dual-processor 2.0 Ghz compute nodes (for a total of 256 effective compute nodes), and a dual-processor front-end, with 1.5 TB of on-line storage. It was purchased with Department of Defence funds under a grant to L. Krishtalka and J. Beach in 2004. It sees a wide variety of uses, including invasive species distribution and ecological niche modeling, phylogenetic inference in systematics and biogeography, as well as other high-end computing biodiversity informatics tasks. The cluster is housed in KU Computing Center, which performs the basic monitoring, and primary hardware and software maintenance and administration is carried out by Dave Vieglais.

Phyllomedusa is a "mini-cluster", built from four Apple Macintosh G5 Pro quad-processor 3.0 Ghz compute nodes (for a total of 16 effective compute nodes), and a dual-processor front-end. It was acquired in 2007 under an IT/Educational grant to Rafe Brown from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Kansas, and is housed in the KU Phylogenetic Computing Education and Research Laboratory (se CompLab here), on the 4th floor of Dyche Hall. "Phyllomedusa" is designed for high-throughput, high-speed quick turn-around parallelized phylogenetic computational analyses, and is an important resource both for primary research as well as teaching purposes. Monitoring, maintenance and administration is carried out by Jeet Sukumaran.