We are all very excited that Shawn Billerman has just arrived back at the Lab in his new role as an NSF postdoctoral fellow! Shawn will be working on the genomics of birds that hybridize in the Great Plains region, taking advantage of the extensive collections from that region that…
Natalie was invited to present on the AAUW-funded project “Empowering Women in STEM” at the board meeting for the American Association of University Women’s New York Chapter. She and other members of the executive board of GWiS Ithaca traveled to Albany on Saturday to discuss this project and their plans…
Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister is one of the leaders of a collaborative team from across Cornell that just received a substantial grant for a project entitled “Empowering Women in STEM to Lead through Inclusive Practice and Community Building.” After completing Cornell’s first Intergroup Dialogue course for graduate students, Natalie wanted…
Visiting scientist Luciano Caldarón, our own Leo Campagna, and a cadre of collaborators just published a paper showing that the European Turtle Dove shows genetic evidence of a fluctuating demography over time, and is currently undergoing a shrinking phase. The combined effect of demography, habitat destruction and hunting is causing…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently presented on warbler genomics at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center as an invited speaker. Dave got to tour their well appointed genomics facility and met with the researchers and post docs interested in avian genomics and conservation.
Congratulations to Andy Johnson for persevering through the publication processs to see his undergrad thesis work out in a peer-reviewed journal. Andy spent two arduous summers in the high arctic putting migration tracking devices on Whimbrels–a first summer to deploy them, a second summer to get them back, and a…
Lab of Ornithology postdoc (and first author) Rusty Ligon and grad student Nick Mason are part of a team that just published a neat paper on the evolution of plumage coloration among finches: Ligon, R. A., Simpson, R. K., Mason, N. A., Hill, G. E., & McGraw, K. J. (2016).…
Postdoc Jen Walsh just returned from a very successful trip to southern California, where she was sampling birds like this salt-marsh-dwelling Savannah Sparrow as part of her broader project on avian adaptations to extreme and challenging environments.
I’m tardy to post here that postdoc Dave Toews recently published an ornithologically quite noteworthy paper in the Auk: Ornithological Advances from his PhD work at the University of British Columbia with Darren Irwin. Their study found evidence of strongly heterogeneous genomic divergence between a number of groups in the…
Here’s a shot of David and Canadian Minister of Science Dr. Kirsty Duncan at a reception in Ottawa this week in honor of the current cohort of Banting Postdoctoral Scholars:
This week Jake Berv presented his work on the avian mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary to the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. Jake’s recent work has focused on how genomes evolve in response to mass extinctions that select for life history traits. This was our lab’s first-ever…
Nick on AOS professional society trends and challenges: Graduate student Nick Mason is the lead author on a paper out today that reports on a wide spectrum of trends and challenges related to membership in the American Ornithological Society. This survey was a major undertaking, the analyses are robust, and…
So far, so good … everyone in our group of freshman advisees seems to be transitioning well to Cornell after these first weeks of Fall classes, in part owing to the wise mentoring by my student advising partner Alyssa Rodriguez (thanks, Alyssa!). And way to go, freshmen! Shown here: (top…
We are enjoying a hard-working visit by Argentinians Dr. Cecilia Kopuchian and Dr. Darío Lijtmaer, who along with Leo Campagna from our lab are in the midst of prepping LOTS of samples for ddRAD sequencing as part of a project investigating the potential role of rivers as barriers to gene…
Probably only at Cornell would you find a regular weekly audience of so many undergrads, grad students, postdocs, and others (71 people total, at yesterday’s first meeting) for a weekly research seminar on bird-related topics! The most recent version of this semester’s full schedule is included below: Ornithology…
Grad student Natalie Hofmeister and former lab member Dustin Rubenstein just published a new paper in Ecology Letters on adaptation to environmental variability in African starlings. Natalie and Dustin show that variability in the environment of African starlings influences patterns of substitution in the glucocorticoid receptor, which allows organisms to…
Happy SNEEB to all: Our lab group joined with the Lab of Ornithology postdocs more generally to host the inaugural Fall semester SNEEB (the Friday social hour for departments with the prior names of Systematics and Ecology, Entomology, and Neurobiology and Behavior…) last evening. Took a little more pre-planning than…
Congratulations to our Ben Van Doren for being awarded the WOS prize for best undergraduate research presentation at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! And likewise congratulations to grad student Sahas Barve for winning one of the main grad student presentation awards, Teresa Pegan for placing highly in…
Wonderful to see so many colleagues old and new! It was fantastic to see so many alumni — former Cornell students, past lab group members, former visiting scientists, field course students, academic advisees … all of you! — at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! You can read…
Jake brings home the NAOC talks: Grad student Jake Berv was the closer in our long series of presentations at the NAOC meeting that ended yesterday. Talking in the very last session of the conference, Jake presented on his deep-time comparisons of diversification patterns in the avian Tree-of-Life, and on…