updates

Todd Bittner gave John a tour of the native lawn test plots at Cornell Botanic Gardens.

New preprint: Expansion load reduces fitness at the range margin of an invasive plant, with Ryan Briscoe Runquist and Dave Moeller. Across a ~150-year invasion chronosequence in common tansy, drift — not adaptation — dominates: range-edge populations carry expansion load and show reduced fitness.

Checking out the darling carnivorous aquatic local, Utricularia (bladderwort).

Joanie Cha joins the lab as a PhD student this fall — our first graduate student!

Lab dinner, sending off Anna Cohen.

Farewell and thank you to Anna Cohen, our first lab manager, whose last day is today. Anna built this lab from an empty room — E. coli pilots, Clarkia germination trials, and most of our protocols. We’ll miss her!

John is co-hosting (with Erik Enbody) a 5-day SLiM Evolutionary Modeling Workshop at Cornell, Oct 5–9, 2026, taught by SLiM’s architect Ben Haller. Free, ~30 seats — registration is open, and one fully-funded travel scholarship is available.

June in California for the Clarkia field season — and Sean’s find at the ranch.

Welcome to Maddie Ore (postdoc) and Ella Mancino (Technician III, 60/40 split with the Agrawal lab) — both joining the lab today!

Our team was invited to submit a full proposal to the Simons Collaborations in Ecology and Evolution program — CONGENER (Community Network Genomics of Ecosystem Resilience), with ~13 PIs across Cornell, UCSC, UCI, and Berkeley.

New paper out in Proc. Roy. Soc. B: Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics, with Jedidiah Carlson, Olivia Smith, Ruth Shaw, and Arbel Harpak.

Benning Lab is starting at Cornell EEB!