G'day!

G'day! First thing's first: if you didn't think this was going to be my attempt at a cheesy parody of Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter, you're gravely mistaken. If you read the text of this blog in an American's lousy attempt at a Queensland accent, you'll be adequately in on the joke. For the record, I'm doing this because I think Australians are awesome and I want to be like them, not because I am making fun of them.

Now that that's out of the way, let me begin... My name is Kevin Kocot. I recently finished my Ph.D. at Auburn University in Ken Halanych's lab studying molluscan phylogeny and evolution. I also did a short postdoc in Ken's lab working on basal metazoan phylogenomics, but you're here for the molluscs now aren't ya? Good on ya (see, that's something Australians say). I've just moved to Brisbane Australia to start an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellowship-funded project in Bernie Degnan's lab. I'm going to keep this blog short and sweet and mostly academic but I won't be able to keep some of my observations about life in Australia to myself. So far I'm simply loving it here. Brisbane is a great city. It's big but not as big as I imagined. I arrived on January 4th and it hasn't taken me long to get settled. I'm living in a beautiful apartment right on the Brisbane River directly across from The University of Queensland St. Lucia campus where I'll be working.