2025 is well underway and the ISB Lab is in full swing! We’ve had plenty of new personnel join, with both staff and students joining the ranks of our avid research team.

Staff joining our team

Dr Elisabeth Williamson and Dr Jess Marsh have both recently joined the team as postdocs.

Elisabeth will be leading a research project exploring the loss of vision in subterranean beetles. To do this, Elisabeth is using bioinformatics techniques to determine what changes have occurred in these beetles’ genomes over long periods of evolutionary time, and what functional changes to vision these might have caused. Elisabeth’s comes to us after having finished a PhD investigating the identity, inheritance, and function of native bee microbiomes.

Jess will be undertaking a systematics project with a focus on spiders that live in Australian caves. Jess has already been hard at work in the Nullarbor caves, tracking down what may be new species of spiders previously entirely unknown to science!

New Students

Katherine Oestmann and Stefan Dahl have joined as Masters of Philosophy Students. Katherine will be exploring the unique Great Artesian Basin spring communities using morphometrics techniques. Stefan will be working on untangling mysteries of bandicoot evolution.

Kelly Summers has joined as an honours student, and will be undertaking a project that seeks to improve our taxonomic understanding of Queensland’s cave cricket fauna.

Farewells

Sadly, Dr Brock Hedges is saying farewell to the group to move to Matsue, Japan, where he will be undertaking a two-year research fellowship.

Brock will be working with a declining freshwater mussel fishery in a series of lakes along Japan’s Northern coastline. His research will seek to better understand the risks posed by climate change seeks and generate new understandings that will improve resilience of these communities.

Grant success

ISB lab student Nicole Fechner and her supervisory panel were recently successful in an application for a major South Australian Grain Industry Trust grant.

This grant will fund Nicole’s research that seeks to provide insight that will help us better manage invasive Mediterranean snail species that are impacting Australia’s wheat industry.

Field Work

Field trips are in full swing, with Dr Erinn Fagan-Jeffries currently representing the team at Bush Blitz in Nitmiluk National Park and Jawoyn Country. A seasoned ‘bush-blitzer’, Erinn is leading efforts to collect wasp specimens in this region that will allow us to better understand Australia’s invertebrate fauna.

Students Milad Khosravi and Jake Thornhill have also recently undertaken major research field trips. These field trips involved environmental DNA sampling in Cape Range, near Exmouth, Western Australia, and on Barrow Island, off the coast of North-west Western Australia.

What’s next?

We expect 2025 to be a big year for the group! Three major grant applications have already been submitted by members of our team, and our paper output has never been higher, with student-led research articles seeming to be published every other week.

Dr Luke Kresslein is currently visiting us from the United States Department of Agriculture to review Australian material as part of his Encyrtid parasitoid wasp research.

Finally, we have launched our new lab website! You obviously know this, because you’re here! This website is the perfect way to stay up to date on everything our lab is doing, from papers, to field work and beyond!