Travel grants for Volvox 2019

Volvox 2019 logo

The Fifth International Volvox Conference will be July 26-29, 2019 at the University of Tokyo Hongo campus. For past meetings, generous support from organizations such as the American Genetic Association, the Company of Biologists, Wellcome Trust, and the Phycological Society of America has allowed the organizing committee to award travel fellowships to students and postdocs. It’s not yet clear if that will be the case for next year’s meeting.

Stephanie Höhn has helpfully put together a list of outside travel grants available to students and/or postdocs, along with their deadlines and membership requirements:

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Repost: Message from David Kirk

After last week’s sad news that one of the founding fathers of Volvox research, David Kirk, had passed away, I thought it would be relevant to repost a message he sent a couple of years ago. The modern series of Volvox meetings started in 2011 in Arizona, and we’ve been calling them the First through Fourth International Volvox Conferences, with the Fifth scheduled for July 26-29, 2019. Dr. Kirk wrote in with some interesting historical insight about Volvox meetings that long preceded the current series:

I got an email out of the blue from David Kirk, and I thought some of it would be of interest. Dr. Kirk is one of the biggest names in Volvox research: he carried out much of the developmental genetics that forms the foundation of our field, he literally wrote the book on Volvox evo-devo, and my impression is that most of the PIs currently studying Volvox spent time in his lab as students and postdocs.

VolvoxBookCover

The email was prompted by the meeting review from the 2015 meeting in Cambridge (he liked it, whew! :-D), and he said that he’s looking forward to the 2017 meeting in St. Louis. The email also had a footnote with some interesting information, which I quote here with Dr. Kirk’s permission:

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