So beyond lucky to get to do my dream* job 👩🏻‍🏫🐝 *minus that one year I wanted to be a fashion designer

Review of CH Waddington's influence on developmental biology and evo-devo: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... includes supp info with his 50th birthday songs!

C.H. Waddington's lasting achievements in development and evolution

ABSTRACT. C.H. Waddington (1905-1975) was a British biologist and perhaps the major figure in developmental biology between the 1940s and 1960s. He is one of the few pre-molecular-age developmental bi...

journals.biologists.com

Our print copies have arrived in the mail! This has been fun/humbling/ridiculous/exciting all at once. Little me would think I’m pretty cool today. Big me thinks I still have a lot of work to do — can’t wait to start my lab at @gtsciences.bsky.social this fall. #SciAmYoungScientists

🎉 @armanafzadeh.bsky.social has been named to @sciam.bsky.social’s inaugural class of Young American Scientists for her innovative research. Manafzadeh will join Georgia Tech this fall as an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. Learn more: biosciences.gatech.edu/news/fossils...

SciAm just announced its inaugural list of Young American Scientists—a group of extraordinary young people changing science for the better. I had the joy of chatting with @armanafzadeh.bsky.social, who studies the evolution of animal joints! #SciAmYoungScientists @sciam.bsky.social 🧪

Armita Manafzadeh

Investigating the shape and evolution of animal joints

scientificamerican.com

The secret's out – thrilled to share I’ve been selected as a member of the inaugural class of @sciam.bsky.social's Young American Scientists! It's been so fun to learn about the work of the other 27 awardees from around the country. www.scientificamerican.com/issue/sa/202...

Two new preprints from my lab, both putting computer science approaches to work for ecology & evolution 🦎 Each tackles the same old bottleneck — turning huge piles of digital images into usable data — and each is a free, open-source web tool you can actually use 🎉 Quick threads on both below 🧵

I think a lot about how mountain species are responding to warming temperatures so it was great to team up with @suzetteflantua.bsky.social @kjfeeley.bsky.social Christi McCain & Jenny McGuire to write a review of sp responses to both modern AND Quaternary warming www.nature.com/articles/doi...

Our work on mammalian hallucal grasping, led by Irene Montañez-Rivera during her time in the @johnnyakatura.bsky.social group, is out now in iScience. A true team effort; thanks to the whole crew for inviting me to contribute a small piece! www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Our special issue of the @journalofanatomy.bsky.social (co-edited by Virginia Abdala and me) on the evolution of joints in vertebrates is out now — check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14697580...

So glad to have been interviewed for this story! I stand by it ⚰️🔨 See the article below and the original paper by Ned Snelling and colleagues for more info on the increasingly dubious connection between high oxygen and griffenfly size 😎

Science Magazine@science.org · 4mo ago

“This study places what may be the final nail in the coffin for the prevailing view that more oxygen made ancient insects bigger.” Learn more: https://scim.ag/4vcqqS8

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐭𝐡𝐲𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐬? Well, we’ve always assumed they did (and for good reason), but there’s been surprisingly little direct evidence to support this assumption. In a new paper, we describe an unassuming little Jurassic fossil that directly confirms it: doi.org/10.3374/014....

a whale is swimming in the ocean and has white spots on its back

ALT: a whale is swimming in the ocean and has white spots on its back

media.tenor.com

PhD candidate!! Congratulations to Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma 🤩🐟🐍 working with her has been the best part of my four years at Yale.

we did 3177 playback experiments on 264 species of birds to learn why males alone defend territories in some species while pairs team up to cooperatively defend home turf in others. and now you can read about it with writing that is fun theconversation.com/its-a-sing-o...

It’s a sing-off! Myth-busting about birds and sex when it comes to defending the nest

Males aren’t the only angry birds defending their territory. A clever test finds which songbirds step up to fight off intruders and the role monogamy plays.

theconversation.com

Final conference as a postdoc featured lots of bird anatomy with Casey Holliday, Emma Schachner, and Dominique Homberger; green chile everything; and a detour to the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Thanks to @crocholliday.bsky.social for the symposium invitation!

Excited to visit UToronto this week for the famous Atwood Symposium! 🦎🦎🦎

Atwood 2026@eebatwood.bsky.social · 4mo ago

2 days left! ✨ Meet Dr. James Stroud @jameststroud.bsky.social, the #Atwood2026 Rising Star in Evolution! 🦎🌡️🌎 Learn more about their work here: sites.gatech.edu/stroudlab/ Atwood schedule: eeb.utoronto.ca/events/atwoo...

Very proud of my incoming PhD student, Joanna Baker, for receiving the NSF GRFP! She worked extremely hard on her application and I'm very much looking forward to her joining my lab @gtsciences.bsky.social this year.

We are also pleased to announce the Dobzhansky Prize Honorable Mention, Dr. Sean Anderson! Learn more about his work: www.evolutionsociety.org/news/display... @seananderson.bsky.social

We're hiring a *post doc*! Are you a global change ecologist (broadly defined) and want to work with Jenny McGuire, @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social, me & many others?!🦎🐦🦴⛰️ Come join an amazing, hungry, and very exciting eco-evo group here at GT! careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...

Join us for our first CNB virtual mini symposium 🐓🏃🏻‍♀️! future events suited to additional time zones coming soon; join our mailing list on our website (link in flyer) to stay in the loop.

Huge congratulations to my mentee, Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma, for winning the @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social D. Dwight Davis Award for Division of Vertebrate Morphology best student talk at this year's @sicb.bsky.social meeting! So pleased to see her creativity recognized 🐍 sicb.org/sicb-news/co...

At the RVC we are grieving the death of the Structure & Motion Lab's creator, and stalwart comrade, Professor Alan Wilson FRS, from a plane crash in Namibia on Wednesday. He was a giant in comparative biomechanics and an amazing scientist. I'm still reeling. It is utterly shocking and deeply sad.

Reporting the death of Prof Alan M. Wilson FRS in a light plane crash in Namibia, while doing wildlife research. He was 62. He built and flew his own planes but I do not know if he either built or flew this one. He even flew from London to Cromer to meet me for lunch (he brought cake). Devastated.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

!!! happy, pleased, and generally floored to be a #SloanFellow. this means more getting out into nature to figure out how mountain birds are responding to climate change

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation@sloanfoundation.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Congrats to the 126 early-career scholars awarded a 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, whose creativity and innovation set them apart as the next generation of scientific leaders! Our #SloanFellows represent 7 fields and 44 institutions across the US and Canada. Full list: sloan.org/fellowships/...

Incredibly cool preprint on empirical fitness seascapes 🌊 by Swathi Nachiar Manivannan & @cbo.bsky.social – if you like thinking about adaptive landscapes, a must-read.

C. Brandon Ogbunu@cbo.bsky.social · 6mo ago

2/3 In one study--“Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity”---we break down fitness seascapes by measuring how environmental context shapes aspects of mutational steps, loci, epistatic interactions, and whole-landscape features. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Had a great seminar visit with the crew at Ohio University — thanks to Susan Williams, @witmerlab.bsky.social, and Peishu Li for a very fun start to the week!

Excited to share that our co-edited volume on the Iron Age Philistine cemetery from Ashkelon is now out! This volume presents the bioarchaeological findings from the c. 250 individuals, each with a dedicated catalogue entry that synthesizes their stratigraphic, osteological & artifactual contexts.

Had lots of fun delivering the @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social Carl Gans award lecture yesterday at @sicb.bsky.social #SICB2026! Grateful to have the support of so many incredible colleagues in comparative biomechanics.

JEB is proud to be sponsoring the 2026 @sicbjournals.bsky.social Carl Gans Lecture by Armita Manafzadeh @armanafzadeh.bsky.social at 13:30 in Oregon 201, the Oregon Convention Center Dr Manafzadeh's lecture is entitled 'Joints: form, function, and the future of comparative biomechanics'