I decided to retire from the Los Angeles County museum as of 28 June 2024. I am a little early in doing this, but I am happy to leave Los Angeles for our house halfway to San Francisco. The commuting and administrative responsibilities were getting to be too onerous, so I left the job, but not the work!

There is way too much to do in Dipterology to quit! Fly School 3 is coming up in a couple of weeks in Costa Rica, and then off to Belem for the iBOL meeting. So if you are a dipterist who wants to visit our collection, you should contact one of our Collection Managers.

Retirement for me will hopefully mean more output, as I get into doing more work on higher phylogeny of phorids based on morphology- our recent paper on molecular phylogeny was way too sparse in taxa and data (my fault in hindsight). Also, I am interested in paring down the number of genera in phorid classification, as there are currently way too many taxa described from one sex or the other.

I hope to provide more web content along the way as well, although we will see. Many claim to want to do this, but never get around to it.

I had a great run at the LACo Museum, and I have to thank all of my colleagues there, especially Weiping and Giar-Ann, who will carry on working on the collection. I will be there in frequently during the year to drop off material or pick up specimens to work on, so let me know if you want to overlap with me.

My boss, Luis Chiappe, presented me with this photo of me, with signatures of my colleagues at my “Celebration of Career” (=retirement party). It was taken in Manaus in 2020 during the Nat. Geographic shooting by Craig Cutler. Thanks, everyone!