Petra Deane-Coe on Swamp Sparrow adaptation: PhD student Petra Deane-Coe gave a clear and animated talk on her innovative explorations of adaptive divergence in swamp sparrows that reside in different marsh habitats. Part of Petra’s presentation involved an in-depth comparison of differentiation as measured through complementary metrics for comparing genome-wide…
Shawn Billerman on sapsuckers at NAOC: Just a few weeks before his dissertation defense at the University of Wyoming, Shawn gave an exciting update on his PhD study of sapsucker hybridization, which he has studied in the field, with genomics, and via niche modelling. Shawn did this work with his…
Nick Mason is everywhere at the NAOC! As in past years, it seems like PhD student Nick Mason was everywhere at the North American Ornithological Conference; in fact I’m quite sure that no other student at the 2000+ meeting had this same degree of multifaceted contribution. Nick was accordingly awarded…
Scott Taylor on chickadee hybridization and fitness: Dr. Scott Taylor, a former postdoc in our lab (since he is now four days into his new job as a professor at U Colorado!) gave a detailed symposium talk here at the NAOC on the breakdown of metabolic pathways (and the underlying…
Warmest of best wishes to lab alumna Vale Ferretti (who got her PhD in our lab a few years back) and her husband Ariel on the birth of their son Faustino! His birthday was August 13th and he came into the world at 2.494 kg (you can tell by the…
Stepfanie on Northern Flicker genomics: at the NAOC conference a day ago, PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon presented on her ongoing field and genomic studies of the great plains hybrid zone between yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers. Even though these two forms are distinct in many plumage traits even beyond their namesake…
Leo on the genomics of a sexually selected avian radiation: Research Associate Leo Campagna led off our lab’s presentations at the North American Ornithological Conference via a talk on his ongoing work on seedeater genomics. The story of this avian radiation just keeps getting better and better as Leo delves…
Natalie Hoffmeister on starling evo-ecology: PhD student Natalie Hoffmeister gave a professional and polished talk today at the NAOC on how endocrine receptors vary genetically in response to selection resulting from environmental variation. Hard stuff to describe to a general audience of ornithologists who aren’t specialists in either of these…
Jen Walsh on saltmarsh sparrow hybridization: continuing the series of excellent (I’m biased, but they really have all been excellent) talks by our lab group at the NAOC meeting, postdoc Dr. Jen Walsh presented today on her PhD studies of the relative fitness of saltmarsh sparrows, nelson’s sparrows, and their…
“Is he a postdoc or a PhD student?”: Ben Van Doren, who graduated from Cornell just this past May and who is shortly off to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, gave an in-depth presentation at the NAOC on his comparative genomic study of stonechats from populations across Eurasia and Africa.…
Winged warblers: the story is out! David Toews’ presentation on the work he and Scott Taylor have led on the genomics of Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers played to a standing-room-only audience at the North American Ornithological Conference yesterday, and apparently there were many dozens of additional people left outside who…
Stepfanie and Brianna in the field: Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and rising sophomore Brianna Mims spent much of the summer chasing flickers across their hybrid zone in the Great Plains. Here are a few photos of these field researchers and their birds:
Our new Handbook of Bird Biology is here! This week we received the very first advance copies of our new comprehensive textbook of ornithology, just in time to share it with the world at the big NAOC bird conference in August. This means that it will be available from booksellers…
Hybrid Zones Revisited: photo shows Dr. Vanya Rohwer (CUMV Curator of Birds and Mammals) showing postdoc Jen Walsh a series of specimens collected recently by Vanya and Cornell students as part of an ongoing effort to document changes in species distributions and patterns of genetic interchange.
Congrats to grad student Nick Mason, lead author Kelly Zamudio, and former EEB PhD graduate Rayna Bell on their paper in the most recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Zamudio, K. R., Bell, R. C., & Mason, N. A. (2016). Phenotypes in phylogeography: Species’ traits, environmental…
Kudos to grad student Nick Mason, his MS advisor Kevin Burns, and collaborator Phil Unitt for doing the hard work of turning their molecular phylogeny of the entire tanager radiation into a series of formal recommendations on the taxonomic nomenclature of this beautiful but complicated group. This is the kind…
Dr. Sebastián Cabanne is based at the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires. He spent the past month here in our lab generating genomic data to study the connectivity between biomes in the Neotropics. Among other topics, Sebastián is interested in various passerine systems from various areas of South…
Evolution2016: Jake Berv gave a talk entitled “The genomic signature of the lilliput effect across the K/PG mass extinction” at the Evolution conference in Austin.
Evolution2016: Recent graduate Ben Van Doren presented a poster at the Evolution Conference on his studies of comparative genomics in the stonechat complex.
Evolution2016: Postdoc Jen Walsh presented a poster at the 2016 Evolution conference on “Signals of Adaptive Variation in Fresh and Salt Water Populations of Ammodramus Sparrows: Defining Conservation Units Based on Evolutionary Potential” as part of her ongoing research on how these sparrows have adapted (or not) to different environments…