Comments (0) Big congrats to current Zayed lab postdoc, Dr. Rodney Richardson, for landing an assistant professor position at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science!
Rodney will be transition to his new life as a Prof in October 2020. Well done Rodney!
A big welcome to Tae and KC who are starting graduate school in the lab this fall. Congrats to KC for earning an NSERC scholarship to do her research here on honey bee genetics. Also, a big welcome to Yassin, a visiting postdoctoral fellow from Turkey and Naiara, a visiting PhD student from Brazil; both managed to secure competitive scholarships from their home institutions to come and train here in honey bee genomics.
L-R: Yassin, Tae, KC, Naiara
And here is most of the lab sporting their new #BeeTheNorth t-shirts :)…
Top (L->R). Simran, Rodney, Tanu, Ida, Yassin, Katie, Dova, KC. Bottom (L->R) Tae, Amro, Arshad, Nadia, Naiara, Bandelle
Hi All. We are celebrating our 10th year at York University this summer. Where did the time go… I still have vivid memories of the first year, the first experiment, the pre-tenure marathon, the random lab certificates, the epic battles with reviewer 3, the coffee runs, the spontaneous celebrations, and the infamous SDI all-nighter… I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had the pleasure of working with many fabulous people that have helped me and the lab grow over the past 10 years. Thanks a million!!!
For fun, here are a few fun pictures of our journey over the past decade…
2009 – the OG crew! Clement was the first to join the lab, followed by 3 promising undergrads
Zayed Lab, Nov 2009
2010 – First colonies and first honey crop 🙂
2011 – crew getting bigger, Amro still has hair, and the birth of the ‘Bee Unit’
2012 – A bit of an epic year for us…first, we put in a lot of work to do this crazy experiment, which totally fails … “Why do you look so serious Brock… we still have next year?”
still 2012 – the famous SDI all-nighter. Note to self, pulling SDI all-nighters is a terrible idea.
but the after party was fun…
Not everything failed miserably in 2012… we entered into the lovely world of population genomics… little did we know that this genomics stuff was going to shape our lives for years to come…
we also got to eat sweet PNAS cake in 2012… ahhh, the look on the cake lady’s face when i asked her to draw fig. 1 🙂
Brock also published this little paper in 2012… it was … ahem … not controversial at all… 😉
We also graduated our first two students in 2012 – yay! 
2013. The calm before the storm…
lab is still getting big. Many fabulous undergrads here! Brock stayed for his PhD and we welcomed 2 new MSc students (Nadia and Daria). Also, legends of the ‘Lior 1000’ started popping up everywhere in the building… Lior – now in med school – managed to extract DNA from 1000 bees in near record time! That is a lot of phenol chloroform folks!
Dr. Alivia Dey also joined the lab in 2013 – yay!
2014 was a really big year. hmmm, where to begin…Our population genomic study go published in PNAS, which meant that we got to taste PNAS cake again; Cake lady at Longos thinks i am officially mad now.
Nadia launched us into the world of NNIs and bee health… Children of the Corn!
I got tenure
Tenured Card
Samir Kadri brought us some ‘killer’ bees from Brazil. #funguy
Samir and his ‘killer’ bees
and some colleagues from across Canada started plotting for a mega honey bee health genomics project – BeeOMICS!
then, there was the famous “Breaking Bee” portrait… Go ahead… Ask me for an extension on your assignment… 😉
2015 – Sweet STAYbbatical for me. Lab is still getting bigger
We got to celebrate and help launch the BeeOMICs project!
We also replaced Lior with a Robot, which we called the Lior 3000 🙂 [no Liors were harmed during this]
2016 – Realizing the potential for comedy, I finally said goodbye to my receding hair line… and boldly went bald 
in 2016, we also witnessed the creation of a masterpiece in photography: Katie contemplates the meaning of life while watching Alivia pipette 6x dye… transcendental? why not?
We had a fun time at ICE 2016 in Florida
Brock, Nadia, Katie and myself, along with a few colleagues at ICE 2016
2017 – we started the year with celebrating Brock and Katie’s graduation
The picture below also documents the birth of the tremendous trio! Stephen + Tanu + Harshil = 2+2 -1 = quick maths!
We also initiated some new students into honey bee research
and Nadia published her PhD study on bees and pesticides in the journal Science… it certainly made for an interesting (and exhausting) few months! 
2018 – this first pic here really took me by surprise. My son came back from school yelling “Dad, Dad, you are in my science homework!”… sure enough, some of the work he was doing in his class had referenced Nadia’s PhD research on bees… published just a few month back… crazy eh?
Then came one of the funniest exchanges during a committee meeting… ever!
Stephen – in a very bold move, presented me and his advisor with a roll of tissue paper ahead of his progress report meeting; He told us that his report was so awesome that we were going to ‘poop our pants’; after a few seconds of shock (and a bit of admiration – no body can pull off something like that except for Stephen), the perfect reply presented itself… i returned the tissue paper roll back to Stephen, and jokingly said “thanks, i don’t need this, i plan to wipe [] with your thesis later”. Tou Ché 🙂 This was the only time i managed to stump Stephen; his report was indeed awesome
We also had a really fun outing at Cold Spring Harbor in the spring of 2018
I co-organized the Cold Spring Harbor meeting on social insect genomics with wonderful colleagues Dr. Sarah Kocher (Princeton) and Dr. Seirian Sumner (University College London)
And when you get that choice, to sit it out or dab… I hope you dab! I hope you dab!
2019 – i think 2019 will go down in the books as another big year for us
Here is an early pic from January after Dr. Rodney Richardson joined the lab… we are still eating cake! 
Oh Captain, My Captain, where art though spirit ?
I had a fun time ‘being’ the entertainment for the first ever CRAM festival. 
and because Genome Canada’s grants are like M&M’s – you can’t have just one – I spent about 9 months working with colleagues on developing another major proposal, called BeeCSI… Here is part of the team preparing in Toronto before the final showdown – a dragon’s den / shark tank type interview that determines our success or failure… i haven’t gotten so nervous about giving a talk since… ever!
Team BeeCSI – L->R: Steve Pernal, Miriam Bixby, Leonard Foster, Rob Currie, Ida and myself
and here is a picture of us after the big interview in Calgary in May … yes I borrowed Laurence Packer’s Bee tie for the big interview… #Lucky Tie
Then, a few days before our 10th anniversary in July, came one of the most epic days in the history of the lab. It started with 2/3rds of the tremendous trio graduating and the whole crew vigorously celebrated over an extended lunch.
and just when we thought that the celebrations were done, I got a call from Ontario Genomics telling me that our BeeCSI proposal just got funded… Clement snapped these candid pics… Needless to say, the lab went nuts. I can still hear #beethenorth bellowing across the halls of Lumbers and Farquharson! 
So, thanks to all current and past members of the Bee Unit – you’ve made ‘going to work in the morning’ one of my favourite parts of the day! Also, a big thanks to our collaborators – for sharing the fun of discovery with us!
Cheers,
Amro
Greetings all. We have an opening for a lab tech position in the lab. please see below.
Lab Tech Position, York University, Toronto, Canada
The Zayed Lab (www.yorku.ca/zayedlab) in the Department of Biology, York University (Toronto, Canada), has a position available for a Lab Tech with expertise in insect molecular biology and genetics starting Fall 2019.
The successful candidate will participate in a pioneering project to improve the health of Canadian honey bees. Our research will measure stressor-induced changes in the honey bee transcriptome in order to identify diagnostic markers of colony health.
We are particularly seeking individuals that have expertise in RNA extraction and gene expression profiling, as well as experience in training and working with undergraduate students.
Degree: MSc or PhD in Biology
Starting Salary: $45,000 per year
Please submit your cover letter, CV, and contact information for 3 referees to honeybee@yorku.ca We will continue to receive applications until a suitable candidate is hired.
I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Rodney Richardson who just started a postdoc in our group. Rodney joins us from Ohio State University where he pioneered methods for molecular diagnostic of pollen collected by honey bees. Here he is behind the BeeOMICS matrix! Welcome Rodney!
The Zayed lab is starting 2019 with a bang – 5 new papers out
Brock Harpur (former PhD student – now Assistant Prof at Prude) led a team of researchers to identify bits of DNA in the bee genome that affecting social immunity – a really cool experiment that just got published in Genome Biology and Evolution. – check out the press release below for more info
Harpur, B.A., Guarna, M.M., Huxter, E., Higo, H. Moon, K-M., Hoover, S.E., Ibrahim, A., Melathopoulos, A.P., Desai, S., Currie, R.W., Pernal, S.F., Foster, L.J., Zayed, A. (2019). Integrative genomics reveals the genetics and evolution of the honey bee’s social immune system. Genome Biology and Evolution. evz018, https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evz018 [link; press release]
Then, there was this lovely (if i am say so myself) review on honey bee population and quantitative genomics by Katie D (PhD Candidate) in Current Opinion in Insect Science.
Dogantzis, K.A., and Zayed, A. (2019) Recent advances in population and quantitive genomics of honey bees. Current Opinion in Insect Science. 31:93-98. [Invited review; link]
Then three papers with international collaborator. One with Dr. Karen Kapehim at Utah State which involved generating a new genome for the Alkali bee
Kapheim, K.M., Pan, H., Li, C., Blatti III, C., Harpur, B.A., Ioannidis, P., Jones, B.M., Kent, C.F., Ruzzante, L., Sloofman, L., Stolle, E., Waterhouse, R.M., Zayed, A., Zhang, G., Wcislo, W.T. (2019). Draft genome assembly and population genetics of an agricultural pollinator, the solitary alkali bee (Halictidae: Nomia melanderi). G3: Gene, Genomes, Genetics. doi:10.1534/g3.118.200865
Another with Drs. Nadine Chapman and Ben Oldroyd on the genetics of bees from Kangaroo Island.
Chapman, N.C., Sheng, J., Lim, J., Malfroy, S.F., Harpur, B.A., Zayed, A., Allsopp, M.H., Rinderer, T.E., Roberts, J.M.K, Remnant, E.J., Oldroyd, B.P. (2019). Genetic origins of honeybees (Apis mellifera) on Kangaroo Island and Norfolk Island (Australia) and Eua, Tongatapu and Vava’u islands, Kingdom of Tonga. Apidologie. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-018-0615-x
and yet another paper the Sydney bee crew; this time led by Dr. Nick Smith who spent a few month here as a visiting PhD fellow. Its an interesting look on balancing selection on cape bee genomes.
Smith, N.M.A. Wade, C., Allsopp, M.H., Harpur, B.A., Zayed, A., Rose, S.A., Engelstädter, J., Chapman, N.C., Yagound, B., Oldryod, B.P. (2019) Strikingly high levels of heterozygosity despite 20 years of inbreeding in a clonal honey bee. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 32:144-152.
This is shaping up to be a very productive year!
best,
Amro
I am very happy to announce that I have been elected as the President of the Entomological Society of Ontario – Canada’s oldest entomological society! I will serve as President Elect till November 2019, then as President till November 2020, then as Past President till November 2021.
More info on the society can be found on their latest newsletter
The entomological Society of Ontario’s executive; AGM 2018
The honey bee lab (www.yorku.ca/zayedlab) at York University’s Dept. of Biology (Toronto, Canada) has a position available for a postdoctoral fellow or research associate with demonstrable expertise in genomics and bioinformatics starting September 2018. We are particularly seeking individuals that have experiences in genome wide association studies.
The successful candidate will participate in the ‘BeeOMICs’ project – a large-scale association study of honey bees comprised of over one thousand colony ‘genomes’ and many colony-level phenotypes.
Qualified candidates are encouraged to submit a cover letter outlining their expertise, a CV, reprints of relevant papers, and contact information for 3 referees to honeybee@yorku.ca before August 25th. Compensation commensurate with experience.
Best,
Dr. Amro Zayed
York Research Chair in Genomics
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
York University
4700 Keele Street, Toronto
M3J 1P3, ON, Canada
Email: zayed[at]yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/zayedlab
Just wanted to congratulate Dr. Matt Betti, who is leaving the lab to take up an Assistant Professor Position at Department of Math and Computer Science at Mount Allison University. Matt was a co-supervised NSERC postdoctoral fellow in my lab and Dr. Jane Heffernan at the Dept. of Math.
Here is a picture of Matt in action during a recent J. Club meeting. We will miss you Matt. Best of luck for the future!
Happy to report that Katie D aced her PhD Preliminary Exam today! Katie’s PhD research involves studying the evolutionary history of Apis, with a special emphasis on African and Africanized populations.
Congrats Katie! 
