I am very pleased to be one of the recipients of the museum’s travel award for the Summer of 2024. Under the support of the travel award, I attended the 35th Workshop on Molecular Evolution (https://molevolworkshop.github.io), which is the most prestigious workshop on evolutionary biology. It has been offered annually by University of Chicago’s Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts since 1988. This year, about a dozen internationally recognized scientists stayed with 45 students from several countries for ten days and taught us principles of molecular evolution and evolutionary genomics, statistical methods, and latest software tools. I left Gainesville on May 24th at around 6 AM and came back on June 4th at around 1:00 AM.

This workshop was very intense, usually lasting from 8 AM to 10 PM each day. The detailed schedule can be found here: https://molevolworkshop.github.io/schedule/. My knowledge on molecular evolution has been greatly improved. I also had the opportunity to communicate with some of the leading researchers in the field. My research will certainly benefit from this trip in the long run.

For the $1000 museum travel award I received, I spent all of them to cover partial of the tuition cost ($2500). Other costs of this trip have been paid by another fund from Dr. Gavin Naylor. I sincerely appreciate the precious support that the museum has granted me.

Certificate

Lei Yang is a Lab Manager for the Florida Program for Shark Research here at the Florida Museum.

The 2024 Summer CMSS Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History, including funds from the Hoyt and Marta Whipple Biodiversity Fund, the Lawrence Dean Harris and Kathleen A. Deagan Endowment, and the Mary Ross Endowment.  If you would like to help support this fund for future CMSS awards, please go to:

Mary Ross Endowment