Rafe Brown's Lab homepage at the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
KU Natural History Museum

Check out the latest breaking news in the Brown Lab...

   
Wolverine Frogs and Fanged frogs make headlines...McLeod and Blackburn both featured on L.A. Times Top Ten Nightmares from the Animal Kingdom. Read about it here (November 2009).

With a fancy fellowship from the Philippine Commission on Higher Education, Maritess Bonachita Sanguilla joins the lab to collect molecular data for her dissertation project on phylogeography of Mindanao river toads, genus Ansonia (October 2009).
Allie Fuiten arrives: a new Ph.D. student from the Bay area (with ties to our friends at the Cal. Acad.) joins us to work on the osteological basis of ecomorph variation in Melanesian forest frogs (August 2009).
Congrats to Jamie Oaks who just won the SSAR Siebert Award for the best student paper in systematics and evolution at this year's herp meetings (Portland, July 2009).
Welcome Anthony Barley, a new Ph.D. student who comes from Davis California, where he has been working with the Shaffer lab for the past year (July 2009). First project: phylogeny of cat-eyed snakes.
Who's down with DPP?! Here's to Jamie Oaks and Charles Linkem whose back-to-back Evolution 2009 talks on Dirichlet Process Priors were featured on Rich Glor's Dechronization forum (Idaho, June 2009).  
Welcome Jeff Witters! Jeff is putting NSF RET funds to use incorporating cryptic species delimitation into his advanced biology class curriculum at Olathe South Highschool (June, 2009)
Bad news: Chytrid fungus discovered at two sites in the Philippines (May, 2009). See press release here
Congratulations to Charles Linkem whose Dissertation Improvement Grant proposal (systematics of the skink genus Sphenomorphus) was just funded by NSF (April, 2009)
Ex-herpetologist Jeet Sukumaran (now deep in the Huelsenbeck zone) departs empirical science in style: with a new species of toad named after him (January 2009)...read about it here

Luke Welton joins the lab, planning to work on Varanus trade forensics and phylogeography (January 2009)

Sukumaran and Linkem publish in MBE! "Choice of Topology Estimators in Bayesian Phylogenetic Analysis" — click here for PDF (November 2008)

 

Two-time Fulbright Scholar Cameron Siler heads back to Asia for 9 months of continuous field work! Read about it here and check out the field blog here (February 2009)

Rafe interviewed by National Geographic's Boyd Matson; listen here (October 2008)
Liz Lusher awarded KU's coveted URA grant! (November 2008)
Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Dave Blackburn makes Science's Top 10 stories of the year! (October 2008)
Dr. Mahmood Sasa (University of Costa Rica) and Rafe are awarded a UCR/KU Collaboration Fund grant for research on amphibians in Cosa Rica's dry forests.
A big "Reno 911" fan, Linkem goes with a bold new look for 2009!

Congrats to Cameron Siler who just found out that his Dissertation Improvement Grant (body form evolution in Brachymeles) has been funded by NSF! (March, 2008)
Jake in the news.... "I call my discovery The Bat" (pdf)