As 2024 draws to a close, I want to take a moment to reflect on another wonderful year for I-deel.

This June, I moved to Canada, where I joined the University of Alberta. It was a slow start with learning new things such as new acronyms, ticketing systems and hidden rules. While I settled into life at the University of Alberta (see pics below for my new workplace with some exotic beasts), most I-deel members who stayed in Sydney have been doing a lot of great jobs in my physical absence (albeit moral presence).

I have been trying to find a way for many years how we could create a lab where people are comfortable expressing opinions and they can also disagree freely and they can resolve such disagreements — this is how science should work and this is how good scientists are made. This year, I felt our members are taking a lot of initiatives to be more independent and inter-dependent. This sounds like an oxymoron but it is not. Many members are leading projects. And also they are working with others to get help for where they can work together or where they can create synergy. I have been extremely lucky with my lab members in the past, but the current bunch is pretty incredible.

Not only they are a nice bunch of people working together. They are very productive and I highlight some of these successes this year:

• Our three PhD students, Coralie, Lorenzo, and Kyle all published their amazing work in top journals (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Environment International, Chemosphere and Environmental Pollution; note Lorenzo get an award for the best paper for his work on a meta-analysis on PFAS transfer in birds).
• Speaking of the best paper awards, Losia led an international collaboration on this very topic into PLoS Biology.
• Szymek published his simulation work on the sample size required to study both sexes in PLoS Biology.
• Yefeng published his in-silico replication work in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
• Patrice published a collaborative paper from our lab meetings on how to best write an abstract in Proceedings B.
• Pietro got his masterpiece of a systematic map of meta-analyses on sexual selection into Biological Reviews.
• Ayumi got her first meta-analysis (the function of eye patterns in butterflies) into eLife.

There are more amazing publications including many blog posts, presentations, and personal achievements from I-deel members this year. These are underlined by dedication and teamwork, for which I thank all I-deel members.

Soon, in Feb 2025, I will be visiting Sydney to celebrate all these milestones with the awesome I-deel members. In 2025, I also have a challenging job of replicating this awesome team here at the University of Alberta – the Centre of Open Science and Synthesis in Ecology and Evolution – a very exciting year ahead!

A few photos from the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton: