Recently, Paul gave a lecture at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Australia titled "Are We Alone in the Universe". This lecture was designed to bring the public up to date with the current state of exoplanet science (i.e. they are everywhere) and what this means in terms finding extraterrestrial life. Paul addressed the difficulty of finding life without understanding the transition from non-life to life, as well as future ways to search for cosmic company. This lecture, as with all of Paul's recent work, stresses the importance of our group’s research in answering whether or not we are alone in the universe.

We are pleased to announce emergence@asu postdoc Gabri recently won the School of Life Sciences (SOLS) Innovative Post-doctoral Research Award! His project with Marek Borowiec, titled ‘Flexible Deep Learning Solutions for Digitized Biodiversity Data’ leverages deep neural networks to automatically recognize the genus and species of ant specimen from one or more pictures. Congrats Gabri!!