John Stinchcombe

Creatures buried in soil for over a century burst back to life in Toronto waterfront A project to restore coastal wetland leads to astonishing discoveries of a host of life: seeds and plant scraps, as well as water fleas, worms, larvae and plankton

Cool stuff, featuring our EEB colleague Shelby Riskin:

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

The genomic response to drought across spatiotemporal scales in Amaranthus tuberculatus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.02.679894v1

New paper by former MSc student @christeinecke.bsky.social! ⭐ A behemoth effort to apply artificial selection on clonal reproduction in #Mimulus guttatus. We show that clonality evolves quickly, but not symmetrically in both directions, and multivariate life history traits are altered too! 🧪🌾

Fun to synthesize some exciting future directions for spatiotemporal genomics in this Tansley perspective.

Check er out!

The Raymond Moriyama pavilion at the Koffler Scientific Reserve, with goldenrods in the foreground, a pond, and willows fringing the pond.

A stunning day to be in the field in Southern Ontario today, at the Koffler Scientific Reserve, @ksrjokershill.bsky.social

High-throughput developmental assay of cold tolerance in Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.676146v1

Congrats to Yash Singhal, a new grad student @utoronto.ca in EEB.

Photo of Dr. Meng Yuan (center), and Aneil Agrawal, Megan Bontrager, John Stinchcombe, Judith Mank, Stephen Wright, and Asher Cutter.

Congrats to Dr. Meng Yuan, who defended her PhD on the genome-wide potential for ploidy & sexual conflict in plants! Many thanks to @judithmank.bsky.social for serving as her external examiner. A fun collaboration w/ @stepheniwright.bsky.social and also @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social for a paper!

MSc position in my lab. Come study the evolutionary & behavioural ecology of insects!
@stfx-university.bsky.social

I am recruiting a PhD student this application cycle to explore questions on the evolution of morphological variation and phylogenetics. I'm especially seeking folks interested in fossil marine inverts. Please reach out to me if interested! Portal opens Nov. 1 eeb.utoronto.ca/education/gr...

Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low

Hmm... Since the test has only existed since 1992, "worst scores since 1992" as teased at the top of the article really means "worst scores in the history of the test."

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/u...

I like coat color in Labrador retrievers! Many people are familiar with them, and its a relatively simple set of phenotypes to explain.

(I also had a Dudley yellow lab, the double-recessive with pink skin and nose, so I'm partial to them).

Toronto in a nutshell.

💯

This paper by John Kelly and Patrick Monahan is a nice illustration of how epistasis contributes to additive genetic variance, and potentially the response to selection:

(No humans or twins here, but the q.g. is top notch)

journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Image of Toronto

JOB ALERT 🚨 We are hiring TWO principal investigators in cell, molecular, systems, or chemical biology in Toronto, Canada at @sinaihealth.bsky.social. We provide a generous startup, fully funded salary and academic appointment at U of Toronto.

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Please repost!

Starbucks’ CEO made 6,666x more than the company's median employee in 2024.

This was the widest CEO-to-Worker pay gap in the entire S&P 500.

Remember this before you order your next pumpkin spice latte.

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

Editorial Manager is impossible. A few years back, I wrote to a few journals to ask them to delete my accounts entirely so that I could start over.

I've had success w/ a few where-- after resetting the PW and finally logging in-- I link it to either ORCID or web of science.

I'm hiring a postdoc to work in theoretical / computational phylogenomics! More info at tinyurl.com/63hb5ew8. Please share!

and, @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social !

My favorite part of this paper: the collaboration started after I sent Meng a biorxiv preprint from Stuart's lab.. She contacted him with questions about that work, and the collaboration grew from there.

Sadly, I'll be missing #ESEB2025 because of the labor disruption affecting @aircanada.bsky.social ...

Flight attendants went on strike as of last night, and my outbound flight was cancelled this arvo despite the Feds ordering binding arbitration to send parties back to work.

Procrustean pseudo-landmark methods in Python to measure massive quantities of leaf shape data Premise When examining leaf shapes that are different from one another, it can be difficult to compare both the overall leaf shape and points along the leaf margin in biologically and statistically me...

New work from Josephs lab grad student Asia Hightower
@puffballove.bsky.social
w/ Dan Chitwood & many many others on general, flexible methods for analyzing leaf shape variation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Picture of presentation title slide showing a soil landscape.

Come check out my presentation on what community properties can predict microbiome resistance to drought today! #ESA2025 COS 015 BCC 336 3:30-5:00

Something that might help: change the culture where editors are expected to make decisions on resubmissions based on a revised manuscript & cover letter.

Most ms are sent for re-review, and if the original reviewers are unavailable (or fatigued), it gets new reviewers... and new objections.

Not angry at all at the advice, and my first post was an OOPS about the mistake I made about not keeping track of this stuff post-tenure.

💯

Have I been forced to do this, under duress? Yes.

Does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone does it and no one objects? Also yes.

Who is in a position on awards committees, tenure and promotion committees, grant panels, etc, to object? People like you, me, others w/ tenure.

I know this is a radical idea.... but we could show SCHOLARLY JUDGMENT.

I got my PhD in 2001. No one needs dates & titles of my conference talks. Literally, absolutely no one.

A post-doc applicant: titles, conferences, dates, might be relevant.

How do we know the difference? By not being obtuse.