Stepfanie Aguillon presented yesterday at AOS on a “side” (but major) research project on limited dispersal and isolation-by-distance in Florida Scrub-Jays. Stepfanie started this as a rotation project when she first arrived at Cornell in collaboration with Nancy Chen. The paper is available today on PLOS Genetics (http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006911). This study…
Research Associate Leo Campagna presented today at AOS on his ongoing exploration of the genes that control plumage — and speciation — in the capuccino seadeater finches. Among the take-home messages of his talk was the finding that although these species have some commonalities in the genes that control their…
Postdoc Jen Walsh talked on the first morning of the AOS conference about her ongoing work on the hybridization genomics of Nelson’s and Saltmarsh Sparrows. Among Jen’s findings is strong evidence for the transfer of adaptive genes from Saltmarsh Sparrows (which have a long evolutionary history of adaptation to the…
Postdoc Shawn Billerman led off by talking about his studies of avian suture zones (locations where multiply hybrid zones overlap in space) on the first morning of the American Ornithological Society Conference. Shawn used models of past and present climate to show that different bird species respond in different ways…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon sent along this link to where her poster is featured on a site about scientific poster design and communication. I’m flagging it here both because the expert at the site found only a few things to tweak on Stepfanie’s work, and because the site itself is…
A paper resulting from Benjamin Van Dooren’s undergraduate honors thesis is out in the latest issue of Molecular Ecology where is is accompanied by a great commentary by Reto Buri. Ben did this honors project in our lab and went on to receive a Marshall Scholarship for his PhD at…
Be sure to catch this presentation if you are going to be at AOS in East Lansing next week! 😉
Not related to research but too good not to post here: Postdoc Jen Walsh using duct tape to keep a bandage on the foot of her pet duck:
PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon is this month’s featured scientist on our graduate student association home page — http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/grads/ — which is worth checking out both to read about Stepfanie and because the site as a whole is indicative of the strength of our graduate program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
The current members of our lab group who are at the Evolution meeting in Portland this week: Leo Campagna, Nick Mason, Gavin Leighton, David Toews, Petra Deane-Coe, Shawn Billerman, Jen Walsh, Stepfanie Aguillon, and Eliot Miller. Add in a few talks by researchers from other countries who visited our lab…
Graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon presented a poster at the Evolution conference on her genomic investigations into the hybrid zone of yellow-shafted x red-shafted flickers. Contrary to all previous forays on this topic, Stepfanie is finding markers that differentiate these forms and that may be associated with their color differences and…
Postdoc Jen Walsh just presented at the Evolution conference in Portland on her ongoing studies of adaptation and gene flow among Saltmarsh and Nelson’s Sparrows.
Postdoc Dave Toews gave a second talk today at the Evolution conferenece, in which he discussed cases of mitochondrial and nuclear discordance in warblers: In yellow-rumped warblers where mitochondrial DNA has introgressed between two forms, and in golden and blue-winged warblers, where mitochondrial DNA is distinct in the face of…
Graduate student Petra Deane-Coe presented a talk at the Evolution conference today in Portland. Petra covered her studies of local adaptation in Swamp Sparrows and her careful exploration of its underlying genetic basis, based on comparisons among whole-genome datasets from sparrows that are adapted to saline marshes versus others that…
Leo Campagna gave a talk today on the genomic architecture of phenotypic differences in capuchino seedeaters. The study (recently published in Science Advances) shows that there are very small genetic differences among these species and that they tend to center around regions that are likely to control the expression of…
Grad student Nick Mason is presenting his work today at the Evolution conference in Portland. This component of Nick’s dissertation looks at the surprisingly complex history of a group of seedeaters, and was done in collaboration with several colleagues from Mexico.
Postdoc Shawn Billerman is presenting his work at the Evolution conference in Portland. This component of Shawn’s study compares the climate niches of several Great Plains hybrid zones and tracks how they have changed over the past 60 years.
Catalina Palacios, a PhD student from Daniel Cadena’s lab group in Colombia, is finishing her six-month research visit by talking about the genomic results from her study of two hummingbird species. Catalina’s work shows how whole genome sequencing can help distinguish hummingbird species that resisted delimitation with other techniques (mtdna…
Postdoc David Toews gave a 5-minute blitz talk today at the Evolution conference on the topic of “How hybridization structures the genomes of related birds”.
Sebastián Cabanne gave a talk today at the Evolution meetings in Portland on the historical phylogeography of the atlantic forest and andean forest biomes. He used data generated in part in our lab during two visits (2014 and 2016) to study patterns of isolation and connectivity in two co-distributed passerines.…