Jessica Light (she/her)

Picture of an oak tree showing leaves beginning to brown for fall. Picture taken College Station, Texas.

Job Alert! Please share widely. Tenure-track position in Plant Systematics in the Dept. of Ecology & Conservation Biology at Texas A&M @tamueccb.bsky.social. Job details here: apply.interfolio.com/171016 #plants #botany #herbaria #systematics #ecology #conservation #evolution

Picture of an oak tree showing leaves beginning to brown for fall. Picture taken College Station, Texas.

Job Alert! Please share widely. Tenure-track position in Plant Systematics in the Dept. of Ecology & Conservation Biology at Texas A&M @tamueccb.bsky.social. Job details here: apply.interfolio.com/171016 #plants #botany #herbaria #systematics #ecology #conservation #evolution

Phthiraptera systematics: past, present, and future Abstract. Parasitic lice (Psocodea: Phthiraptera) are small, wingless parasites of birds and mammals that have been at the forefront of coevolutionary stud

🪳 Want to learn all about lice?

Check out Dr. Jessica E. Light’s (@jeclight.bsky.social) new paper on lice classification in Insect Systematics: Past, Present, and Future. This new publication should do the trick!

🔗 academic.oup.com/isd/article/...

#TAMUECCB #InsectSystematics #Taxonomy #Lice

IDEA Award The ASN/SSE/SSB Inclusiveness, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) Award was created in 2019 by the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and the...

Do you know someone who has contributed to strengthening the evolutionary biology community by promoting inclusion and diversity?

Nominate them for the IDEA award! More info:

www.systbio.org/idea-award.h...

You may self-nominate!!!

Gray's Anatomy illustration of a hand

How Did Hands Evolve? The Answer Is Behind You. (My story of some surprising evo-devo!) nyti.ms/42Cg8xH

Anderson Feijó examining rodents in the collections of the Field Museum. CREDIT: Field Museum

Thumbs are cool and all, but have you ever thought about how important thumbnails are? They just might have been the key to rodents' evolutionary success. That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Join us! The Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History is hiring a curatorial associate! For more information : careers.amnh.org/postings/4529

Learning The Basics of Phylogenetic Analysis | Everyday Is A School Day 🧬🔬 Explore phylogenetic analysis from genome to tree! Basic workflow with R/Bioconductor. Learnt to work with large genomic dataset. Extract 16S rRNA from 10K+ E.coli strains using dataset dehydrate, ...

🧬🔬 Explore phylogenetic analysis from genome to tree! Basic workflow with #rstats #bioconductor. Learnt to work with large genomic data. Extract 16S rRNA from 10K+ E.coli strains using dataset dehydrate, barrnap for extraction, rapidNJ for tree building & FigTree for visualization.

#microsky #idsky

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life?
Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones.
This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE
#Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Hey everybody! @drjuliawester.bsky.social and I have a new paper!

We surveyed over 800 scientists, science communicators, and science educators who use social media.

Conclusion: Scientists no longer find Twitter useful or pleasant, and many have switched to Bluesky! 🧪🌎🦑

doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

Please share — Michigan State Plant Biology is searching for an Herbarium Director! Tenure stream, open rank faculty position balancing research, teaching, service, and admin responsibilities. Join us! Reach out to me or @emjo.bsky.social with questions!

plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...

Our paper is already one of the ten most-shared on social media articles in the history of the journal.

As of right now, 14 people have posted about it on Twitter.

And 1,018 people have posted about it on Bluesky.

Which sorta makes our point here?

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Calling all natural history/museum collections folxs

The theme of the @systbiol.bsky.social breakout meeting in Baton Rouge is 'The Importance of Natural History Collections'

The LSU Museum of Natural Science will host some events. Hope to see you there, Jan 9-11, 2026.

ssb2026.github.io

Rare as hen's teeth: an Assistant Curator job, with our fantastic team at National Museums Scotland! Closing date 24th August #museums #museumjobs
careers.nms.ac.uk/job/748553

📢 Congrats to Dr. Jessica Light (@jeclight.bsky.social) on her new Zoological Journal paper!

A decade-long international collaboration, presented at the International Louse Conference in France.

🔗 academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

#TAMUECCB #Research #Biodiversity #InternationalCollaboration

A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance

Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A bibliography for the 2025 IDEA plenary The recording of my talk for the 2025 IDEA plenary is now posted over on the Evolution meeting YouTube channel (there’s a bunch of dead air at the start of the recording; the action starts a …

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a...

Education and Outreach Coordinator, Texas Field Station Network, Biodiversity Center Job Posting Title: Education and Outreach Coordinator, Texas Field Station Network, Biodiversity Center ---- Hiring Department: Department of Integrative Biology ---- Position Open To: All Applicants ...

Job! Outreach coordinator, Texas Field Station Network. This position will also put you in collaboration with the UT natural history collections, and, by association, me. But don't let that deter you.

a dragonfly perched on a hand wearing pink nailpolish

Do you fish in freshwater? Please share or/and complete our survey gathering data on observations of insects for our study on aquatic insect population declines! The link to our survey is here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/VXLMY89. Please share if you know anyone who might be interested in participating!

Really proud to have worked with my 14-year-old, Anjali, on this new and free kids' book on #evolution.

Published in time for the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Please check it out and share!

www.lsu.edu/mns/news-and...

She is careful and thorough, will maintain whatever level of confidentiality you will need, and telling your story is important for our community.

More details coming soon, but mark your calendars ...

Breakout meeting for @systbiol.bsky.social‬ The Society of Systematic Biologists - will be Jan 9-11 in Baton Rouge!

Topic is 'The Importance of Natural History Collections'

@jembrown.bsky.social is primary host/organizer

ssb2026.github.io

Government | Harvard University Browse the latest Government courses from Harvard University.

Proud of Harvard for pushing back, exercising some creativity, and, maybe, helping folks get some needed education.

Harvard is making many of their online government courses FREE.

I just signed up for "Citizen Politics in America".

They even asked me my Gender.

pll.harvard.edu/subject/gove...

three rows of baleen suuports from a blue whale visualized with CT

three rows of baleen suuports from a blue whale visualized with CT

three rows of baleen suuports from a blue whale visualized with CT

Baleen is hairy, but the mat of hair has a support system from whence it emanates. This support system must play an important role in minimizing back pressure.

The #Morphocloud workshop made me pull up an old data set.
🧪

Release RAxML-NG v2.0-beta2 · amkozlov/raxml-ng Main new features Adaptive tree search heuristic (Togkousidis 2023) , (Togkousidis 2024) Multiple fast branch support measures Integrated model testing Full Changelog: 1.2.2...2.0-beta2

RAxML-NG v2.0 beta is here

github.com/amkozlov/rax...
Features
1. Difficulty prediction
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
2. Adaptive search academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
3. Early Stop
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
4. Model selection
5. Rapid bootstrapping academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

UT System announces $100 million investment into civic leadership school The money will help pay for a permanent home for the school on UT-Austin's campus. Conservative donors and lawmakers, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, helped create the school in 2023.

UT's entomology teaching lab, where I run the fall field entomology class, is being forced out of its decades-long home to make room for the Republican Civitas think tank.

No obvious replacement site for us has been offered.

If you care about the NSF and science, now is the time to make your voice heard!

The evolution tri-societies are running a Week of Action for NSF! We MUST make some noise -join us!!

@sse-evolution.bsky.social members will see the below email in their inbox today, spread the word!

Pls RT!

Besides the gorgeous journal cover, the article it links to uses 724 classic Chinese poems to estimate the range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise over 1400 years.

These animals are threatened by human activity, have intelligence comparable to a gorilla & are critically endangered.