JOIN THE SMITH LAB
Information for Prospective Undergraduates:
KU Ichthyology at the 2014 Darwin Party
Members of the Smith Lab are always looking for the opportunity to involve and train undergraduates interested in research careers. We have and continue to integrate undergraduates into the lab using either morphological or molecular data. All undergraduates that have worked in the laboratory have gone on to graduate school in biology and will be authors on scientific papers resulting from their efforts.
Information for Prospective Graduate Students:
The Smith Lab is always on the lookout for new graduate students who are interested in fish diversity, systematic biology, natural history, and evolution. If you are interested in applying, take a look at recent papers published by the students, postdocs, and Leo to get a feeling for the types of work done in the lab. If this research is appealing, please feel free to contact Leo if you would like to explore graduate school possibilities, and visit the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology website for more information on the department and our graduate program.
Graduate students in the lab are encouraged to develop their own research project that complements the other researchers in the lab. Our strategy is to work with new graduate students closely for the first few years, so they develop a project that is fascinating to them and exciting to other evolutionary biologists. For the last few years, the graduate students are encouraged to develop their ideas and discuss their projects with other scientists in the lab, at KU, and worldwide. During this time, they will gather and analyze all of their data, begin publishing chapters of their dissertation, and eventually focus on completing their dissertation.
The lab is open to a diversity of projects ranging across the biology of fishes, macroevolution, and systematics, but most work explores evolutionary problems that involve an understanding of phylogeny, character evolution, fieldwork, and/or a laboratory component. Students can choose to be more molecular, more morphological, more theoretical, or more ecological.
Information for Prospective Postdoctoral Fellows:
The Smith Lab is always looking for the possibility of working with new postdocs. This, more than any other personnel endeavor, depends on sources of funding. Please don’t hesitate to contact Leo directly if you would like to explore possibilities in the laboratory. In general, researchers in the lab are interested in macroevolutionary problems involving fish phylogenetics.