Category: People

Yes, finally, Eddie Griese obtained his PhD degree!

Eddie successfully defended his thesis entitled “Battle between insect eggs and host plant: Ecology and evolution of pierid egg-induced responses in Brassicaceae” last Monday in front of a tough committee in the Aula of Wageningen University. Besides, he can immediately start his new job as an ecologist in an agency near Berlin. Congratulations to both…


Dr. Georgios Valsamakis, congratulations to receiving your PhD!

Still online, Georgios did a great job in defending his thesis. His talk and defence was even a summa cum laude (!), and in total he got a cum laude! All three female supervisors are super proud of him 🙂 And now up to a nice and successful postdoc time!


New PhD students working on hitch-hiking Trichogramma wasps

Liana and Xianhui (from left) both just started their PhD on the ecology, evolution and genetics of anti-sex pheromones of passion-vine/cabbage white butterflies and natural selection by hitch-hiking egg parasitoids spying on these pheromones. Both will have supervisors from Biosystematics group and the Laboratory of Genetics @WUR. They will conduct field work either in Panama or The Netherlands, olfactometer bioassays, analyse pheromones and the genetics behind them.


New PhD student Eva Drukker

Eva Drukker (MSc) is from the Netherlands and studied biology at Wageningen University. She did her internship research at the Bureau Stadsnatuur, studying arthropods on green roofs. In March, just before the Corona outbreak, she started her PhD on this topic supervised by Prof. Eric Schranz, Casper Quist and me. For the coming four years she will be studying these new ecosystems in our urban landscape. Among other things she is trying to unravel the complicated interactions that take place in these elevated habitats. Besides her research, she is very fond of and experienced in teaching and therefore takes part in two courses that we give at Biosystematics Group.

Credits: Judith Tielemans