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Autumn 2024: Began mentoring five UCLA undergrads in a research project looking at the fecundity effects of the Lake Wildfire on valley oak

Autumn 2024: New paper published in PLOS Biology which uses historic strains of the coffee wilt disease pathogen to show that host specificity and disease were driven by serial horizontal transfer events. All analyses, scripts, and code are on .

Autumn 2024: New opinion article published in Trends in Plant Science in which we argue that, as in crop plants, some types of DNA methylation in trees can induce phenotypic changes, including changes in climate-relevant traits. This follows recent findings in a few tree species that show phenotypic change following DNA methylation of promoter regions upstream of genes.

Autumn 2024: Invited to give a departmental seminar in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at UCLA.

Summer 2024: Gave a talk in the Adaptive Epigenetics session at the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology meeting in Montréal: “Can DNA methylation help us understand climate adaptation in trees?”

Summer 2024: The Lake Wildfire erupted in the Santa Ynez Valley, where the UC Sedgwick Reserve is located, a long-term oak study site for the Sork lab. We went up as a lab the week following the fire, and I returned after a month to measure physiological traits of burnt and un-burnt trees… watch this space!