Ben Stone

Many folks know this already but wanted to make an official announcement: I am super pleased to share that I will be starting my lab at Mississippi State University @msstate in Fall 2025! We will be recruiting grad students and a lab tech to start as soon as August ‘25

NEW PAPER OUT! Assessing drivers of leaf endophyte diversity and composition across a broad geographic and phylogenetic scale, we found that: -assembly patterns differed between bacterial and fungal endophytes; (1/3)

Join us!! I'm recruiting a postdoc and grad student to work with us on parallel trait evolution, quant and pop gen, and speciation in penstemons. Find out more about our research interests here: wessingerlab.github.io Informal inquiries welcome!

The Budke Lab @UTK_EEB is recruiting #PhD students to start fall 2025. Applications due Dec 1. Check out our lab website to see if your research interests are a good fit jmbudke.github.io & then reach out via email. Please RT & thanks! #gradschool #phdjourney

@WTF_R_species @msstate Cool! Noxubee is really nice. We bird there regularly

@benstemon @msstate I enjoyed my time at Mississippi State! Was just there a year ago to collect mosquitoes at Noxubee for genomics.

Many folks know this already but wanted to make an official announcement: I am super pleased to share that I will be starting my lab at Mississippi State University @msstate in Fall 2025! We will be recruiting grad students and a lab tech to start as soon as August ‘25

We will seek to answer questions about adaptation, speciation, and more primarily in the genus Penstemon. If you are interested in the lab, check out the shiny new website for more about my work and for contact info: benstemon.github.io

@HilaryRoseD Super cool! Thanks for sharing! Yes, your ID is spot on — P. davidsonii. The pics I posted are from Mt Rose near Lake Tahoe. Very cool to see another example in this species

@benstemon Beautiful! Here’re purple and white morph growing together near the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon a few weeks ago. Penstemon ID is beyond me so not sure of the species–likely davidsonii?

More fieldwork pics. Finally captured my white whale — beautiful white-flowered morph of Penstemon davidsonii. The only example I am aware of in nature!

Usually the flowers look more like this

@MarySagatelova There’s TOO MANY THINGS going on MARY

@benstemon so called scientist

Obligatory “I did a field trip last week and forgot to post pics” post Look at the difference in color in these two separate pops of Penstemon newberryi!

@MarySagatelova Good point I didn’t really notice that

@benstemon ok the HAIR difference tho

@plantbard Yea most of the plants around Lassen look like that!

I’m hardly ever on this thing anymore, but I’ll be at #Evol2024! Come see me share @gabbrosandstone’s fantastic work on heterosis in Boechera! 4:30 on Saturday, Ecological Genetics I! Also, we’re recruiting! Looking for grads and pdocs. Feel free to reach out!

Looking forward to the Boraginales symposium today at 17:00 (5pm) in A10.08! I will be trying my best to fill Mike Simpsons shoes who unfortunately was not able to make the meeting. I can promise some beautiful nutlet photos! #IBC2024

We were very excited for the corpse flower

So glad to be back at #Botany2024 If you’re around, come check out my talk tomorrow at 4:30 in the Molecular Ecology section. There are PENSTEMON HYBRID ZONES

Hey #Botany2024 stop by my talk tomorrow morning to FINALLY hear about what @carriewessi and I have learned about the genetic architecture of Penstemon’s personate flowers!! Tuesday - 8:30am- Development & Structure - Grand Gallery B

Come see Trinity’s talk!!!

Very happy to see that my 'artificial winter' for our Rubus plants was largely a success. Read on for what we did. It's been ~a week, and I've found flowers coming out for several genotypes already. Two of which I'm certain would not have flowered w/out treatment. 1/