Rachel Germain

Beautiful plot!

Speciation. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. Edited by Catherine L. Peichel, Åke Brännström, Daniel I. Bolnick, Ulf Dieckmann, and Rebecca J. Safran. Cold Spring Harbor (New York): Cold Spr...

Our paper on how to use niche theory (MacArthur's minimization principle) to understand eco/evo limits to diversity got a shout out from Quarterly Review of Biology: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

The paper is hard to access but a copy can be found here drive.google.com/file/d/14EGZ...

[8 Nov 2025] Another roundup of #ConservationJobs, mostly in 🇨🇦.

All postings include salary. I am not involved in these positions.

Please share to help others — working to conserve nature is rewarding and needed!

www.linkedin.com/posts/aerinj...

This fellowship offers a great deal of research freedom + leadership experience. Salary = $77,000/year + benefits and $7,000/year in research funds - expertise in bioinformatics will be desirable for one of the two positions

Applications are currently being accepted for UBC's ✨️ Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellowship ✨️ (two positions!!), due Jan. 15

Please share far and wide 🚀

(See thread)

Looking for a paper for lab meeting/a discussion group? Look no further!

I wish there were more (any??) graduate fellowships that are based more on improvement or recent record of success, ignoring an initial rough start

We use annual plants, flour beetles, and duckweed in the lab, greenhouse, and field to test how processes of community assembly interact and how they feedback with evolution

Check out our website & lab instagram page

(email and website deliberately not posted here to prevent spam)

Kayak trip with the lab in Deep Cove BC

🚨postdoc opportunity at UBC🚨 applications are now open for the Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, due internally Oct. 15 - www.postdocs.ubc.ca/award/killam...

I can nominate 1 person and give feedback on that nominee's materials - if interested plz email me by Sept. 10 - join us!

I can't remember the last time I successfully logged into NSERC or the CCV portal without needing support to manually unlock my account, due to being unable to remember which childhood best friend I used as a security question when I made my account 15 years ago

A plane landing in Montreal

Closing in on @csee-sceemtgs.bsky.social !

Is @tessgrainger.bsky.social trying to tell me something 🤔

Projects are arranged based on timescale (x axis) and spatial scale (y axis)

Today in lab meeting we are going to do a workshop for each student to develop an organizing conceptual schematic for their thesis (e.g., to be used for the thesis introduction or exit seminar). Anyone here willing to share theirs for inspiration? Here's mine as an example of what I mean 👻

Oo looks really cool! I'd definitely need a deeper read before being able to answer your question with any confidence - I'll check it out this week

Ecologists are obsessed with linking process and pattern, but quantifying the core processes of community assembly (and their interactions) in a natural setting is extremely hard. But we've done it! Using a fun new method.

Very proud of this paper and of Emilie and Megan's leadership 🥳

An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write - Nature Biotechnology Nature Biotechnology - An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write

Lots of excellent advice in this piece. The core message - only through writing do you really think and order your thoughts into logical sense. Makes a case for not using AI for 1st draft because you bypass the thinking step
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@naturebiotech.bsky.social
#PlantScience

Each day we creep closer to the handmaid's tale

Reports of USA border officials demanding access to people's devices and denying entry due to evidence of political leanings...this post alone will probably get me banned 😆

I think this is the answer - I suspect people compare them often without realizing, but at least the two models yielded identical fits

I simulated a fake dataset with a binomial distribution and used that fake data in a glmmTMB with A. a binomial error distribution and B. a beta error distribution (to test the consequences of my choice)

The beta distribution had a hugely lower AIC. Anyone know why??

Also one more thing, i think it's helpful when people give an idea of the time/leadership commitment of various activities (eg volunteer). Some people have massive lists and i can't tell if they're a bunch of one offs or if someone dedicated year to leading something

That includes time management, but also my time as a salad bar attendant means I can cut up a cantaloupe in ways you could only dream of

Same is true for work experience. You might not think working at a grocery store is relevant but it can be both for assessing uncommitted time to research and also because a number of skills are practiced in formal work settings

Hot tip for fellowship applications (imo): I see a lot of people being vague about their TAing load/other activities that take up time. Reviewers sometimes use this information to weight productivity. e.g., if two people have the same output but one person TAed way more

$3400 cad to publish a paper with the currency conversion 😬 i.e., 10% of my nserc

The default smiley on outlook changes the vibe in a way I don't love - it's almost dead in the eyes, can't put my finger on it

Peer review is nothing compared to 300 students carefully scrutinizing every sentence, word, symbol, choice of formatting in a midterm exam

I had that exact desk lamp

Gotta love that the reason for threatening tarriffs keeps changing over time 🤔

This looks great!! Do you cover diagnostics/troubleshooting? That's where I'm currently stuck...things looking not bad but unclear if good enough (eg pp_check etc)