Here at the end of 2022, it is time to do as I have done since 2016, and give some reflections on the year. These focus mostly on the academic aspects of the year, though for reasons that will soon become apparent, the personal and academic aspects of 2022 were exceptionally strongly intertwined.
One event has eclipsed all others this year: my wife and I had a baby. The whole year started off with us eagerly and impatiently awaiting his arrival—and he took his time! But on the 3rd of February, my son was born. So, I spent a large chunk of my year (about 16 weeks) on parental leave. For some reason, we also decided that it wasn’t quite enough stress, and so we also started house-hunting, found a new place, and bought it. So, in October, we moved for the fourth time in three years. And hopefully this will be the last time for a long, long while.
Somehow in spite of the exhaustion of being a new parent, this year has been an excellent one in terms of output. I had 11 papers come out, two as first author, three as senior author. These yielded 26 new frog species, 4 new frog subspecies, and 8 new gecko species; my best year ever in terms of new taxa (previous best was 35 species described in 2017). Particularly significant among these were our monographs on Brygoomantis frogs, and Domerguella geckos. These also received some nice media attention. In addition to taxonomic and systematic works, I was involved in a fascinating analysis of squamate skull bone networks that yielded new and important insights into the evolution of microstomy by blindsnakes, led by the brilliant Catie Strong; a couple of commentaries on minimalist taxonomy, led by arachnologist Ali Zamani; and I published results of my postdoc at the University of Konstanz, in the form of a phylogenomic analysis of mbuna cichlid genomics in Lake Malawi. I am ending the year with two papers in revision and one in review, but a few others lined up to be submitted soon as well.
In addition to the papers, I had a shocking 13 book chapters published (four as first author, one as last author, seven as subject editor). These were all part of The New Natural History of Madagascar, which we have been working on for several years. It has been very gratifying to be part of this enormous project. It is a shame that the new descriptions published in 2022 have already rendered some chapters outdated, but alas, that is the nature of the medium.
On the social media front, I started the year by wrapping up the #FrogOfTheDay twitter megathread for all of Madagascar’s then-described frogs. Over the course of the year, I cracked 10,000 followers on twitter, 2500 on facebook, 2000 on instagram, and 8000 on tumblr. With the shocking crash of twitter in the wake of the hostile take-over, I opened up an account on ecoevo.social (a Mastodon server), and returned to tumblr. Neither is really a satisfying substitute for sci-comm potential that twitter had, and I will be continuing to look for alternatives in the new year.
My lab has grown substantially in 2022. We have had three excellent Bachelor’s students, Joris Fleck, Clara Keusgen, and Desiree Schumann. Joris finished his Erasmus+ Bachelor’s thesis project with me in the summer, and produced an excellent thesis that we are expecting to turn into a publication in 2023. Clara is on course to submit her own thesis project in early 2023, and Desiree is currently working on segmentation of some of our micro-CT data. Erasmus+ master’s student Collin Bos started work on a project on bioiniformatics and mitochondrial genomics of cophylines, co-supervised by Ricardo Pereira. And finally, in December 2022, I took on my first PhD student, Ade Prasetyo Agung, who will remain based at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, and is co-supervised there by Dr Wen-Bin Yu. Ade will be looking at evolutionary phylogenomics and diversification of Hemiphyllodactylus geckos in China. I am so happy to have this fantastic team assembling, and am really looking forward to the new adventures 2023 will bring us!
The current project focal to most work in my lab is our DFG-funded project on taxonomics of cophyline microhylid frogs. My postdoc, Dr Alice Petzold, has been driving this ahead, and although we have had some very big bumps in the road (a shipping disaster to the US resulted in the loss of some irreplaceable DNA libraries), we are now eagerly awaiting some of the major results of the project. I am anticipating several publications from this project in 2023, but the largest and most significant are likely to be delayed until 2024. Alice and Joris both presented at the European Society of Evolutionary Biology meeting in Prague.
With my burgeoning lab, I need to secure some more funding for future projects and new students, so writing and submitting grants was a big focus for me this year. I somehow managed to submit eight separate grants in 2022, ranging from a few thousand euros to hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, of the seven I have so far heard back from, six have been rejected and one accepted (a Synthesys+ travel grant to visit the NHMD London in 2023). I don’t expect to hear back on the final grant (and the largest I applied for in 2022, a DFF Research Project 1 grant), until March 2023. So, on the whole, 2022 was a VERY hard year in terms of funding. But I have much higher hopes for next year.
Teaching kicked off in earnest this year. I lectured on two University of Copenhagen courses: Animal Morphology and Herpetology. Then, in August–September, I flew to Tanzania to take part in a three-week intensive field course, teaching Tanzanian students as part of an EU-funded project called CONTAN. Towards the end of the year, I attended two courses on University Pedagogy, one of which will continue in 2023. It may surprise some readers to learn that this is the most I have ever taught in a single year; in Germany there is very little emphasis on teaching during your doctoral studies, and except for the first one, I had little teaching role in my postdoctoral positions. But I am finding the teaching, and pedagogical training, to be very rewarding.
At the museum, a lot has been going on. I have taken on the role of head of the Vertebrate Unit. We are trying to embark on some cross-unit collaborations to join forces and get various unit-relevant tasks done more efficiently. I have also joined the museum’s Education Board. Meanwhile, in the herpetology collection, collections manager Daniel Klingberg Johansson and I, with the assistance of various students at different times, have embarked on the enormous and extremely complex task of rearranging the anuran (frog) collection. This was previously sorted according to George Albert Boulenger’s 1881 Catalogue, which, as one might imagine, is slightly out of date. Before the holidays began, we had reached H in our alphabetisation of the collection by family-genus-species. I hope to finish the entire rearrangement in the first quarter of 2023.
The new museum project, where I am assistant curator on the Biodiversity gallery, has made huge headway since I first wrote about it briefly in my last ‘year in review’ post. Louis Buckley, formerly of the NHM London, was hired on as the gallery’s Exhibition and Interpretation Manager. We have come out of the year with the main plans laid for the gallery, and detailed content now in planning, including showcase mockups and specimen selection. It’s been an exciting project to be a part of, and I am looking forward to moving into the next phase in the new year.
With all of this going on, unfortunately there have been some other projects that had to give. Regrettably, my co-hosts and I were not able to record a single new episode of the Squamates Podcast; it’s now been over a year and a half since our last release. This has largely been as a direct result of my new family situation, as well as the overall extreme business of all of us, but I have not given up hope for the show to return in 2023. Meanwhile, Katharina, Miguel, and I only managed to release four new videos on the Anatomy Insights channel: a short clip on hemipenis preparation, and full dissection videos on ray-finned fishes, annelids, and mammals. We originally had planned to have monthly releases, but finding time for recording was very difficult indeed. Hopefully we can pick up the slack in 2023. Some other projects I wanted to initiate or complete in 2022 fell completely by the wayside, which has built some considerable pressure into the year to come.
In summary, this year has been exceptional in terms of both challenges and, somehow, overall outputs. Only really in writing this piece has it become clear to me just how much I got done this year, especially considering that I spent over three months of it on parental leave.
For previous years in review, click here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016