updates

The fall semester is under way, and we’re excited for our undergraduate researchers — Nia, Emma, Sean, and Ari — to start helping out on lab projects. John is co-teaching two courses this term: BIOEE 1780, Cornell’s introductory course in evolutionary biology, and a new graduate seminar, Agentic AI in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, with Xiangtao Xu. The seminar is a hands-on and skeptical look at agentic AI as it relates to EEB, where we will discuss the possible futures of EEB in a world with widespread, capable AI.

Todd Bittner gave John a tour of the native lawn test plots at Cornell Botanic Gardens.

New preprint: Expansion load reduces fitness at the range margin of an invasive plant, with Ryan Briscoe Runquist and Dave Moeller. Across a ~150-year invasion chronosequence in common tansy, drift — not adaptation — dominates: range-edge populations carry expansion load and show reduced fitness.

Checking out the darling carnivorous aquatic local, Utricularia (bladderwort).

Farewell and thank you to Anna Cohen, our first lab manager, whose last day is today. Anna built this lab from an empty room. We’ll miss her!

Lab dinner, sending off Anna Cohen.

Joanie Cha, the lab’s first PhD student, joins the lab — they’re working with us for a month before grad school starts.

John is co-hosting (with Erik Enbody) a 5-day SLiM Evolutionary Modeling Workshop at Cornell, Oct 5–9, 2026, taught by SLiM’s architect Ben Haller. Free, ~30 seats — registration is open, and one fully-funded travel scholarship is available.

June in California for the Clarkia field season — and Sean’s find at the ranch.

Welcome to Maddie Ore (postdoc) and Ella Mancino (research specialist, 60/40 split with the Agrawal lab) — both joining the lab today!

Anna Cohen joins the lab as our first lab manager

Our team was invited to submit a full proposal to the Simons Collaborations in Ecology and Evolution program — CONGENER (Community Network Genomics of Ecosystem Resilience), with ~13 PIs across Cornell, UCSC, UCI, and Berkeley.

New paper out in Proc. Roy. Soc. B: Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics, with Jedidiah Carlson, Olivia Smith, Ruth Shaw, and Arbel Harpak.

Benning Lab is starting at Cornell EEB!