 We are very proud to congratulate Laura Alencar for receiving an Honorable Mention in the ScientistA 2025 Award. Laura’s achievements continue to inspire a new generation of Brazilian and international scientists working to make a difference through knowledge, innovation, and collaboration.
Congratulations, Laura! We cannot wait to see what is next. Congratulations to Júlia for winning the 2025 Henry Seibert Award from the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) in the Morphology/Physiology category! We are incredibly proud of you!   This summer, we welcomed Laura Rosario Sánchez, who is part of the Summer Undergraduate Research in the Environmental Sciences (SURES) program. She is visiting us from the Dominican Republic and is working on the physiological diversity of Caribbean rain frogs (Genus Eleutherodactylus). As part of the project, Laura will join fieldwork in the Dominican Republic, collecting ecological, behavioral, and environmental data, and assisting with physiological assays such as water loss, metabolic rate, and heat tolerance. Back at Yale, she will learn DNA extraction, sequencing, and phylogenetic analysis, gaining field, lab, and data analysis experience. We are excited to have her in the lab!
 Josie Marks joins the lab this summer as a part of the Yale Peabody Museum Internship Program. As part of this internship, Josie is working alongside Isabela and Henry to segment skeletal elements in the Hispanolan Rain Frogs (Genus: Eleutherodactylus) adaptive radiation.
 Huge congratulations to Isabela Hernandez for being awarded the Lewontin Award by the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE)! This award recognizes not just academic excellence in evolutionary biology, but also potential in early-career PhD students. Isabela’s work exemplifies both as she uncovers the behavioral and ecophysiological diversity of Caribbean rain frogs.
We are so proud to see Isabela’s talent and dedication being recognized in such an inspiring way. Your work is just getting started, and we can’t wait to see where it leads!  Members of the Muñoz Lab contributed to a new study published in Science Advances! The authors used a genome-scale dataset covering nearly 400 species of wrasses and parrotfishes (family Labridae) to reconstruct their evolutionary history. They found that these vibrant coral reef fishes rapidly diversified around 20-15 million years ago during the Miocene, a period of global climate stability. Rather than a single cause, the study shows that this burst of diversification resulted from multiple, independent events across the wrasse and parrotfish tree of life. These findings highlight the power of genomic data in revealing how Earth's biodiversity has developed, insights that are key to predicting how reef ecosystems respond to modern environmental change. The study was led by Yale EEB graduate student Chase Brownstein and includes contributions from Laura Alencar (Muñoz Lab), Edward Burress (former Muñoz Lab postdoc, now at the University of Alabama), and Prof. Martha Muñoz, among others. The study was supervised by Prof. Tom Near (Yale EEB). Check it out! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu6149
We are thrilled to share that Muñoz Lab took part in the "Scientists in Action" workshop organized by LEAP New Haven Mentoring & Yale Peabody Museum, yesterday! A huge thank you to everyone who made this event possible. We especially want to shout out our amazing team members—Laura, Saúl, and Henry—for their incredible support in creating a warm and welcoming space for our mentees and for jumping right in to make the day special. The energy from the middle school students at Booker T Washington, King Robinson, and Lincoln-Bassett was truly inspiring. They left the workshop buzzing with excitement, eager to share all they learned about reptiles, salamanders, and sciences as they headed off to their next activities. This event highlights just how important community engagement is in sparking scientific curiosity in young minds. We can’t wait to keep working to inspire the next generation of scientists!
 Emmy James, who earned her BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, just published her undergraduate thesis research in the journal Ethology (Publications). Emmy did her senior thesis research in Dr. Martha Muñoz’s lab, where she studied the effect of temperature on aggressive and evasive behavior in staged encounters among different species of woodland salamanders and their hybrids. Emmy is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where she is studying the effects on heat stress on birds. Congratulations to Emmy!
What an incredible weekend it was for us! We were thrilled to take part in SICB 2025, sharing our research through both presentations and posters. The conference gave us a fantastic chance to connect with fellow researchers, gather valuable feedback and build new collaborations for the future. It was a great moment to reflect on how far we have come and get excited about the new challenges and discoveries ahead. A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by and supported our work!  Laura Alencar shares this exciting news with us -her latest research has been featured on the cover of Evolution Letters! The cover shows a male of Sceloporus minor, and endemic species of Mexico, captured by co-author Saúl Domínguez-Guerrero, and also featuring Brooke Bodensteiner as a co-author. We are very proud of the talent that is part of our team. Check out our work:
|
Lab BlogWe will be keeping this page up-to-date with lab happenings and on going research at the Muñoz Lab Archives
October 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed