Mason Stothart, MSc, PhD

I am excited to announce that I’ve taken up a position as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK. I will be joining the lab of Dr. Sarah Knowles, where I will be using quantitative genetic and community ecology approaches to study transmission of host-associated microbes in the wild (specifically the…

Happy to see this paper out from samples collected during my MSc. In it, we describe how seasonal rhythms in the grey squirrel gut microbiome differs between urban and rural forest environments. Have a read! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10692

I successfully defended my PhD and submitted my thesis for archiving! I can’t thank my supervisors, colleagues, friends and family enough for their support over the last few years. A special thanks also to the many field technicians and students who have helped contribute to the collection of the Sable Island Horse Project dataset. This…

I unexpectedly made it out to Sable Island for a fourth full field season on the Sable Island Horse Project. This year was a fun triathlon of thesis writing in the early morning, field work during the day, and lab work late into the evening. Thanks to the rest of the field crew for helping…

Excited to have been invited to give a keynote lecture at a symposium for “Microbial Ecology and Evolution” at the 2023 Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution conference in Winnipeg. Thanks Drs. Aleeza Gerstein and Leanne Grieves for the invite! It was great to share some of our work on the quantitative genetics of microbiome…

Excited to see our most recent Sable Island horse paper out in Molecular Ecology Resources. We show that shallow shotgun sequencing of the microbiome recapitulates similar biological patterns as amplicon sequencing at comparable costs, while also providing direct measure of functional gene contents. Our hope is that this paper will help encourage other researchers to…

A new collaborative piece of research published in which we investigated the effect of urbanization on grey squirrel hair cortisol concentrations in two cities of different latitude. Happy to have contributed samples and the cover photo for this article!

Truly honoured to have been selected for this award. The Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution has been my favourite scientific society by miles. My presentation seems to have gone over well! It was great to be able to share my research with the broader community, especially after years of remote work and virtual meetings….

Some colleagues and I published a summary of the Animal Microbiome Research Group’s 2021 virtual meeting and an overview of this group’s first year of life! It has been absolutely fantastic to watch this group grow and attract so many awesome early career researchers. If you study animal microbiomes and are interested in joining the…

This was a nice methodological paper in which we compared whether storage temperature (-20 versus -80) over 4 years affected our ability to reconstruct Sable Island horse fecal bacterial communities using 16S amplicon sequencing. TLDR; it doesn’t seem to. For a relatively small-scale and straightforward methodological comparison, we really struck a nerve: Lead author Stefan…

Happy to see the first data chapter of my PhD out, and just before the holidays no less. A fun bit of collaboration with @jocelynpoissant @ruthjgee @GavriliucStefan @ali__wilson Astrid Henry and Phil McLoughlin. More exciting work on the @SI_Horses microbiome soon to come! https://t.co/Ovx7or0pxy — Mason Stothart (@M_Stothart) December 22, 2020