Wednesday 14 December 2016

Week 14: A quick Summary!

My bike After the snow this Sunday!
Hello once again everyone and welcome to the blog, with Christmas getting closer there is not much going on around at the university, however I am busy trying to finish off as much as I can before I leave for England.

I started the week with the usual group meeting, here I spoke to my supervisor about my conversation with Roger Butlin the week before and he suggested that I invite him to be a part of my project. After the meeting, I shot off an email to Roger and not too long later I received an email from him confirming he would be able to be a bit more involved in my project. This was amazing news, his advice on my project will be invaluable and with his reputation and knowledge on the topic it should help my project do very well.  

My amazing Christmas advent calander! 
During the week I had multiple PhD student representative responsibilities, the majority of which was administrative issues such as, poster placements router, records of our previous meeting and passing along the votes of the PhD students on the structure of our “chain of command” to the administration. Also during the week I fixed my trip to Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic along with my hotel and the workshop itself. I will be away for a month in January taking part in a very intensive course, so I hope to learn a lot and have a lot to talk about in my blogs.

The two images are  the type of food
 we ate at the works Christmas party
By the end of the week I had finished writing my second digest but soon had it sent back for some major revisions. Also, the first has now been edited and is soon ready to be published. After this second digest, I will not be doing any more, although the experience I have gained doing them and the publications themselves are amazing for my portfolio, I believe I have reached the maximum of what I can get out of them. At the very end of the week I had a day course on academic writing. The course provided some very useful information, on the entire concept of writing and publications and how to do it. I can already see myself using some of the advice I was given and I feel much more prepared for my first piece of work/publication. If I have some more time next blog post I will go into detail on the things I learnt as they were extremely useful and think that anybody who is involved in writing publications should know. Finally at the very very end of the week we had the departments Christmas party. It was such a lovely evening with fun games and the Norwegian Christmas dinner is truly amazing! 
Playing in the snow instead of writing my blog! 

Although this blog is very short and I would have loved to go into more detail about a few topics I brought up this week, I do not have the time as you can tell it is already 3 days late (I was out in the snow when I should have been writing my blog post :D )! Next week I hope to have more time to put into my blog, however I will be traveling to England that day so it may be late again. I hope you enjoyed the quick summary of my week and I hope to see you again in the next one.  

Monday 5 December 2016

Week 13: A bumpy week

Hello again everyone, I hope everyone enjoyed my big catch up blog last week and now I will try to get back to a normal upload. However, last week did not start off so smoothly as I was ill on Monday, but I was back to work on Tuesday.

Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Lucca (Barga) in Italy
This week I have found out that I was given a place at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) which were recommended to me by Roger Butlin, a leading expert in speciation. The conference and seminars topic is speciation which is very important for my research and should provide me some useful contacts for the near future. It will be held at Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Lucca (Barga) in Italy.

Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic
After finding out this good news I was hit with the unfortunate news that I could not receive a credit card through work due to me not having a “permanent” personal identification number here in Norway. I also cannot get this number until I have passed my trial period on my contract which is set at 6 months. So, I was having problems paying for the workshops, travel, and courses however thanks to a work around I have managed to get this sorted and I am very excited for my trip to Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic.

I was also lucky enough to have a skype call with Roger Butlin, where we discussed my project a little and my upcoming ethics work. Roger, described speciation in a way that I had never thought about before and had really redirected my energy on a more constructive path.  The point he made about speciation was that the time it takes to complete the process for example in birds is around 10 million years. The length of time of speciation is also similar to the average interval between species events (7 million years for birds based on phylogeny) on a lineage and so most lineages are in the process of speciation most of the time.

A nice example of  Fucus distichus
I was also in contact with James Coyer an expert on Fucus who I have had previous contact with and asked some more about species and speciation in the Fucus genus (The Fucus distichus complex). He explained that the Fucus distichus complex is comprised of several morphs, each of which has been described as a separate species or subspecies. The morphs seem to be stable from generation to generation and in common garden studies, yet hybridization is common. On the basis of a mtDNA ITS spacer, his research had determined that there was no difference among the morphs and suggested that they all be considered F. distichus. This was verified by another study using 13 nuclear markers. Using this information and what I have learnt from Roger Butlin I will attempt to write a nice little paper on the species concept and tie it nicely into my research and the genus I love so much Fucus!

This was the last bit of sunlight we will see in Bodø this winter. 
I understand that this blog has been rather short as it was quite a lot of random administrative work this week. However, I have used some quite in-depth scientific terms in this blog post which I will leave some links explain them in the bottom of this post(found in bold) if you are confused and want to learn more and some other interesting links! I hope you all have a great week and I will see you all in the next blog post!  




Interesting links:

Highlighted words:
Phylogeny/Phylogenetic treehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree