Fall 2022 highlights

As we're toward the end of the fall semester, looking back to how this semester turned out, we're happy to share some highlights ... There were some challenges, ups and downs, but overall it was productive..

Awards

• Vero was awarded a Black and Indigenous Scholars Award from the American Society of Mammalogists and a renewal of the Train Faculty Fellowship from WWF
• Nancia and Vero were awarded the grant “Lemur Fund” from Re:wild to support their research on lemur ecology in Madagascar’s rainforests

Publications

• Anaid & colleagues documented the birth of an infant black-howler monkey in this paper published in Primates (Don't forget to check out the video in the supplementary information! 
• One of Nancia’s PhD chapter, investigating the robustness of plant-frugivore interaction network in a fragmented rainforest landscape, is published in the journal Conservation Biology.  ​

A newborn howler monkey with its mama. Photo by Anaid Cardenas Navarrete

Graphical abstract of our recent paper in Ecology and Evolution.

• A team led by Vero recently reported an unprecedented discovery of arboreal mouse lemurs sleeping in a burrow on the ground in the rainforest of Ranomafana, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution
• We reviewed current knowledge about frugivory and seed dispersal in Madagascar in the book The New Natural History of Madagascar. 

Others

• Anaid passed her Qualifying Exam in December and is now a doctoral candidate
• Hasina defended her Master's at the University of Antananarivo in November and then participated in a training on designing a research project in Kenya offered by the Tropical Biology Association
• Hasina & Onja are wrapping up this month their participation in the program Global STEM Field Assistant by National Geographic Society but will continue collaborating.
• Rindra was selected to participate in the iDiv Summer School in Leipzig, Germany in August to develop skills in molecular evolutionary biology in Biodiversity
• We were happy to have Dr. Seheno Andriantsaralaza (University of Antananarivo) and Dr Denise Spaan (University of Veracruz) join us as Visiting Scholars this semester. We enjoyed the intellectual exchanges and looking forward for future collaborations.

Representative sample of the Razafindratsima lab, Fall 2023 at the lab's holiday party, celebrating our diversity with a diversity of food from different countries/regions. From left to right: Jade Tonos, Jessica Stubbs, Anaid Cardenas Navarrete, Kat Culbertson, Vero Ramananjato & Onja Razafindratsima.