Huge congratulations to Dr Ben Kuhnhäuser on defending his DPhil thesis on the Phylogenomics and Biogeography of the Calamoid Palms at the University of Oxford.
For his thesis, Ben has done an huge piece of work generating phylogenomics data for almost all of the ca. 550 species in the rattan palm subfamily. He then used this data to clarify the backbone relationships within calamoideae, infer a dated species-level tree and investigate the biogeographic relationships between different parts of Southeast Asia and Australasia, the home of the rattans. Ben's thesis was "accepted as it stands" by his examiners - something that very rarely happens at Oxford.
Ben's main supervisor was Dr William Baker at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, but he is part of the PEB group because he was co-supervised by Wolf Eiserhardt. It is an absolute pleasure to have him in the group (now as alumnus) and we wish him the best of luck for his current postdoc at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and whatever he decides to do afterwards.