[Kummerspeck: literally grief bacon in German. The excess weight gained from from over eating.]

In the Coop lab we’ll be piling on the kummerspeck due to our sadness at Torsten leaving the lab to return to Germany.

For the past 6 months we’ve been hosting Torsten Gunther a PhD student from Hohenheim. Torsten has been working on a variety of projects on detecting adaptation and gene flow in A. thaliana during his time with us. One of his projects has been to extend Bayenv to more robustly identify local adaptation through environmental correlations, we hope to have that program and a paper out shortly.

It’s been really great fun having Torsten in the lab – both scientifically and socially – and we’ll miss him hugely. (Yaniv and he had a running argument over who ate the last of the cookies and cakes, and Torsten was constantly amazed about how I knew no German despite having taken it for 5 years at school.) We are looking forward to seeing Torsten at SMBE this summer and working with him more in future. We all the Coop lab wish him happy travels in his remaining time in the US and a safe trip home!

Below are a few photos of Torsten’s farewell party. [Note I don’t have that many chins in real life, but Jeff Ross-Ibarra really is that tall.]

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