What a great first semester at TCNJ! I am very excited to have welcomed Alanna, Amanda, Nitya, and Syndi to the lab and report on a very exciting fall semester.

A definite highlight was the first Viburnum Summit held at Yale University. We had ~23 Viburnum researchers joining us from Brown, Cornell, TCNJ, UCLA, and the Universidad de los Andes with participants representing four countries. It was an excellent day full of discussions concerning all aspects of Viburnum including recent field work, phylogeny, biogeography, plant-mite interactions, biogeography, floral evolution, and lots about leaves! Specifically, we heard about the evolution of leaf shape, leaf life span, leaf anatomy, and physiology.

Following the Summit, we hosted our first lab visitor, Felipe Torres, a master’s candidate at the Universidad de los Andes. Felipe met with TCNJ students and gave a talk on his research concerning species delimitation of a Viburnum species complex in the Andes of Colombia.

We look forward to all that’s to come in Spring 2013!

Viburnum summit participants. New Haven, CT. November 2012.

Clem lab visits the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History