Both to do with Hanna’s Finnish cultural award; we needed to do something outdoorsy so that we’re not too cultural all the time. First, we dragged ourselves all the way up Pilatus from lake level. Isobel got to do her marmot face selfie and we all got rather sweaty. The following weekend was less sweaty but no less fun – rafting down the Rheinschlucht, but no selfies or any other photo evidence survived.
Together with Erik Svensson (Lund), Florence Débarre (Paris) and Tim Connallon (Monash, Australia), we got multi-year funding for an ESEB Special Topics network. We will be running workshops for students and researchers around the topic “Linking local adaptation with the evolution of sex differences”. That’s fantastic news, now we have to figure out what the first concrete thing will be!
This Finnish prize for significant cultural achievement is awarded once a year and – guess what:
Hanna Kokko is one of this years recipients of the award!
Congratulations from the whole team, that’s really great!!!
By the way, from a reliable source we know that the national anthem was compulsory. It’s not easy to stand next to a famous rapper, sing the national anthem, not really remembering the lyrics…
Find some impressions, here (in Finnish).
Or at least a tiny bit about it in English.
In February we started a hopefully long-lived tradition of exploring mountainous areas with Tanja Schwander’s group (they do very cool stuff in Lausanne). We exchanged a lot of protocols (e.g. versatile uses of mushrooms, spinach etc.) and proceeded to build a giant snow invertebrate of somewhat uncertain taxonomic identity.
At this years Swiss Conference on Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, Biogeography and Conservation kokkonut Nina Gerber was the lucky winner of the best student talk award in the category Evolution.
Congratulations Nina!
Go to:
Size the day! Especially in autumn, when you can find some rare, but amazingly colourful sunny days. That’s what we told ourselves and planned this recent group hike.
Well, sun? No. Colours? Yes! And a warm and welcoming Solothurn with all it’s (eleven?) wonders. We didn’t drink an “öufi” (swiss german for eleven), the famous beer of Solothurn, but fortunately the cake made up for it.
To see the whole adventure of our group hike to the Pilatus have a look at the gallery…
Our recent guest we could welcome at kokkonuts was Heidi Colleran. Heidi is working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and is interested in interactions between demography and culture, with a special focus on reproductive decision-making during the process of demographic transition. We hope you had a successful time in Zurich and you can proceed with new ideas for modelling!
