Having gotten somewhat settled in my new program, I asked my boss how she might feel about my blogging under my real name. She allowed as how that would be just fine. Hi, I'm Jessica. It's nice to meet you.
Which brings me to the really exciting part, which is that I also get to tell you guys that I am privileged to be training in a genetics lab which studies Belyaev's tame foxes! No, really. Where better to be for someone obsessed with the mechanisms behind domestication? We don't have a colony of the foxes here, sadly, but my boss goes to Siberia a few times a year and brings back genetic samples as well as astoundingly cute videos. The lab itself is plastered with photos of foxes playing with things. And the science, obviously, is extremely cool.
I am very lucky to get to work in a lab which works directly with canids. Until very recently, that was nearly impossible to do; in fact, one of the reasons I initially decided to get a DVM instead of a PhD was that I could not find a lab at the time (2007) that would let me work with canids. But dogs are finally getting to be a hot research topic, which has turned out very well for me.