2024
June 2024: Judy Li has arrived to start her post-doctoral fellowship with us investigating the microbiome and virome of polar bears.
June 2024: Mike Blazanin arrived from Paul Turner’s group in Yale to start his post-doctoral position with the King and Otto Labs. Welcome! He will be tackling the impact of host defence heterogeneity on pathogen virulence evolution using evolution experiments and theory.
April 2024: Antoine Filion has joined us for a few months to work on a computational project studying the role of host biodiversity on the spread of avian malaria. Welcome!
March 2024: Kim has been given Honourable Mention for the Dobzhansky Prize at the Society for the Study of Evolution. So proud!
Feb 2024: Kim has published two additional papers from her post-doctoral project, one in American Naturalist and another in Symbiosis. Amazing!
Jan 2024: Congratulations to Emily, who has left to start her Assistant Professorship at Keele University!
Jan 2024: Judy and Emily have had a worm microbiome paper accepted in Phil Trans B. Congrats!
Jan 2024: Kim has had her big worm evolution experiment accepted for publication in Current Biology. Wow!!
2023
Nov 2023: Ian Will has joined us from the University of Central Florida to start a post-doc investigating the mechanisms underpinning host responses to warming and infection. Welcome, Ian!
Nov 2023: Kayla has been appointed the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Evolutionary Dynamics of Host-Pathogen Interactions worth $8M CAD. Government Announcement. UBC Zoology Announcement
Oct 2023: Dominik Vinopal has arrived from Norwich to begin his PhD in Zoology. Welcome!
Oct 2023: Kieran moved to an Assistant Professorship at Queen Mary-University of London. Congratulations!
Oct 2023: Kayla has joined the UBC-Hakai Sentinels of Change Team to evaluate patterns of parasite/microbiome biodiversity change in the Salish Sea.
Sept 2023: Serena Johnson has started her PhD in Zoology with us. She joins us after completing her MA in Oxford Biology. Welcome!.
Sept 2023: Chelsea Higgins joins us from University of Iowa where she completed her MSc. She will be working towards her PhD in Zoology. Welcome!
Sept 2023: Georgia moved to an Independent Fellowship at Collegium Helveticum Zurich. Amazing!
Sept 2023: Cameron Smith has started a post-doc position with us, moving from the University of Bath. Cameron will be modelling the evolutionary epidemiology of pathogens in immune-primed hosts. Welcome!
July 2023: Kayla received the Mid-Career Excellence Award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
June 2023: Manisha Dosanjh joins the King Lab as our UBC Lab Manager. Welcome!
June 2023: Leah Fulton, Melissa Chen, and Sarzana Hossain have joined our lab in conjunction with Prof. Cara Haney’s lab at UBC. Welcome!
May 2023: The first of the new recruits to the UBC-based lab. James Forward joins as a Directed Studies undergraduate. Welcome!
May 2023: Judy joins us at UBC from Oxford in the final months of her DPhil.
March 2023: Kayla has moved to the University of British Columbia! The King Lab group will be split between UBC and Oxford until 2026.
Feb 2023: Kayla, Justyna Wolinska (FU Berlin), and Matt Hall (Monash) organised a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on ‘Infectious disease ecology and evolution in a changing world‘
Feb 2023: Georgia and Iela (summer undergraduate student) had a paper accepted in Biology Letters. Congratulations!
Jan 2023: Very exciting! Kayla was elected as a Fellow in the Linnean Society of London. https://www.linnean.org/The-Socie
2022
Nov 2022: Kayla was awarded the Zoological Society of London’s prestigious Scientific Medal
Oct 2022: Georgia (and former student, Suzie Ford) had a paper accepted in Heredity.
Oct 2022: Kim published a dispatch in Current Biology and was interviewed by The Scientist
Sept 2022: Judy’s first PhD paper was accepted in Global Change Biology. Extreme cooling and heating in experiments can reduce host microbiota diversity!
Sept 2022: Emma joins us from the University of Amsterdam on a MSc internship. Welcome!
July 2022: Sam officially joins the King Lab and will be co-advised by Prof. Craig Maclean. Very exciting! Sam will be exploring the impacts of fever-like temperatures on bacteria-phage coevolution.
July 2022: Kim, Toby, and Judy have published a collaborative effort on symbiosis and heating in TREE.
June 2022: Yunyun joins us on a CSC visiting student internship from China. Welcome!
May 2022: Kayla was interviewed by Current Biology on her career.
April 2022: Former labbies – Charlotte, Alice, and Jordan – as well as collaborators have published a long-standing project on host-parasite coevolution in Current Biology.
April 2022: Kim published her first paper with the King Lab. An extensive review on immune priming by symbionts in Microbiology.
Feb 2022: Kim was awarded an American Naturalist Young Investigator Prize. Amazing, Kim!