Monthly Training Grant Breakfasts
Selected Wednesdays at 9:00 AM (unless otherwise noted)
September 3, 2025
Speaker: Jef Akst, managing editor of BioSpace
Topic: "Swapping the pipette for the pen: How to make the leap to science writing"
Jef was a CTRD predoctoral trainee, and received her masters degree from the EEB program at IU Biology, working with Butch Brodie and Mike Wade on sexual selection in seahorses. She spent the first part of her career at The Scientist, where she helped launch new editorial projects, oversaw the production of the monthly print and digital magazines, and managed the editorial freelance budget, among other responsibilities. In March 2023, she started her tenure as managing editor at BioSpace, which covers biopharma news for industry professionals. Her talk will focus on her career trajectory as a writer and editor.
October 1, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Creagh Breuner, Professor and Associate Dean, Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, University of Montana
Topic: "Glucocorticoids regulate breeding onset in a montane passerine with extremely variable phenology"
The transition from migratory to breeding physiology needs to match the local breeding environment, but there are few cues on breeding environment phenology in intermediate and long-distance migrants while they are en route. Mountain white-crowned sparrows experience severe inter-annual variation in snow-pack at their breeding sites due to ENSO events (El Niño and La Niña). We followed early season migration-breeding transitions over 15 years in a population of white-crowned sparrows breeding just outside Yosemite Park in the High Sierra, evaluating the role glucocorticoids may play in keeping birds in a more ‘irruptive’ state while conditions at the breeding site were still too severe for breeding.
November 5, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Isaac Miller-Crews, CTRD Postdoctoral Trainee
Topic: "How social context shapes transcriptomic coordination within and across brain regions"
In this talk I will discuss some new neural transcriptomic approaches we are developing in the Rosvall lab for studying how multiple brain regions respond and prime for social challenges in free-living Juncos.
December 3, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Julia Saltz, Associate Professor of Biology
Topic: "Understanding the causes of social network variation in flies"
Social network position can influence sex-specific social behavior and reproduction, but the reasons that individuals and groups have the social network structures that they do are poorly understood. We are trying to figure this out in flies. I’ll present some data with clues from genetic and behavioral analyses.