Visit from Daniel Blumstein in Göttingen
On September 20, 2019, Prof Daniel Blumstein from UCLA visited the SoHaPi group at the German Primate Center in Göttingen. He presented his long-term research on wild yellow-bellied marmots, a facultative social species, and talked about how to build from it to understand the evolution of sociality in other systems. Afterwards, the SoHaPi students got the chance to talk to him about career paths and to discuss some of their own results.
SoHaPi I PhD student DORIS WU defended!!!
On August 23th 2019, Doris Wu successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis on the causes and effects of Plasmodium spp. infection in wild chimpanzees. She is the 3rd student of the SoHaPi group to receive her Ph.D.. We wish her all the best for the future!
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SoHaPi 2 Retreat in June 2019 (German Primate Center, Göttingen)
In June, the SoHaPi 2 crew met in Göttingen for their retreat. This time, our meeting focused on gut microbiomes and we welcomed our two guests Katherine Amato (Northwestern University, Evanston) and Tuomas Aivelo (University of Helsinki, Helsinki). Thanks to our speakers, we got intriguing insights into the effects ecological, social and phylogenetic factors can have on gut microbiomes in humans and non-human primates; and we learned about host-parasite interactions in mouse lemurs and ticks and got introduced to the Helsinki Urban Rat Project (HURP). We also caught up on the progress of each PhD project, continued our discussion on measuring social bonds and made plans for future retreats.
 Katherine Amato presenting her work on gut microbiomes in humans and non-human primates. |
 Tuomas Aivelo giving a talk on parasite-host interactions in lemurs, ticks and rats. |