A big congrats goes out to Mitchel Dender today for successfully defending his MSc thesis entitled “Using phenotypic integration to explain inter-population variation in growth rates of Chinook salmon” from Christina Semeniuk’s lab. Co-supervised by our lab, Mitch’s thesis explored the applicability of using the framework of phenotypic integration to optimize complex phenotypes in aquaculture settings to maximize production value. Mitch’s work has broad-scale applications for both evolutionary ecology as well as applied aquaculture and was part of a large NSERC Strategic Partnership Grant (SPG) led by Dr. Daniel Heath to examine the performance impacts of outbreeding captive chinooks stocks with locally-adapted wild populations. Congratulations again Mitch.