Postdoc Shawn Billerman recently started an impactful new job here at the Lab of Ornithology related to the recently announced merger between the Handbook of Birds of the World and Cornell. Shawn will be a science editor for the new Birds of the World project, which will involve, among other things…
Grad student Jake Berv has been selected as Life Sciences Fellow at the University of Michigan. After completing his PhD later this Spring, Jake will move to Michigan where he will begin a postdoctoral position as a Life Sciences Fellow. The Michigan Life Sciences Fellows program is a multidisciplinary community…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s personal essay describing her experiences with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is out today in the Working Life series in Science Careers. In it, Stepfanie calls attention to this issue that affects a surprisingly large fraction of people. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/03/how-i-learned-cope-seasonal-affective-disorder-grad-school
After a very productive period as a postdoc here, Dave Toews has fledged to become an Assistant Professor! His Toews Lab is officially open for business just a few short hours south of Ithaca in the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania State University. Dave will be recruiting new graduate students…
Dr. Sabrina McNew joined our group as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow back in November. Somehow I seemed to have missed posting this arrival as an update here — my apologies, Sabrina! Sabrina comes to us from the University of Utah where she recently defended her PhD under supervisors Sarah Bush…
Research associate Leo Campagna and postdoc Nati Garcia are co-leading the “Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics” course that started in Fall 2018 and featured another successful field trip to coastal Patagonia over Winter Break. Leo and Nati were joined in their winter migration by Eliot Miller (Collections…
Natalie received the Cook Award yesterday from Cornell’s Office of Development and Diversity, which recognizes her “commitment to women’s issues” and her “contribution to changing the climate for women at Cornell.” Natalie’s service as former president of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Student Association and current president of Graduate Women in…
Research from Shawn Billerman’s dissertation on sapsucker hybridization was recently published in Molecular Ecology. In the paper, Shawn and co-authors Carla Cicero, Rauri Bowie, and Matt Carling show how the Red-naped x Red-breasted sapsucker hybrid zone has shifted over time using specimens collected over a 40-year period, with high levels…
We are very happy to welcome Tulane University PhD student Sarah Khalil to our lab for the first half of 2019! Sarah is working here on the genomics of coloration in red-backed fairy-wrens as part of her broader dissertation project on that species. At an earlier stage of her career…
Warmest of congratulations to Leo Campagna and Rox Razavi on the arrival of their daughter Gia! We are super-excited to have her as the newest and littlest member of our lab family.
Leo Campagna and Trevor Price review “The Ascent of Birds” by John Reilly in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. This popular book summarizes the topic of bird evolution, illustrating “how geography, ecology, and lots of time answer the question ‘How did the incredible diversity of over 10 600 extant bird…
Pablo Lavinia and Darío Lijtmaer visited the Fuller Evolutionary Biology lab in 2016 and 2018 to work on various projects. This phylogeographic study on the Large-headed Flatbill (Ramphotrigon megacephalum) and the Fawn-breasted Tanager (Pipraeidea melanonota) explores how species with different ecologies have responded to environmental barriers in the Neotropics. …
Sebastián Cabanne visited the Fuller Evolutionary Biology lab in 2014 and 2016. In this publication in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution he explores the history of connectivity between two forest biomes in the Neotropics, the Andean and Atlantic forests, through the phylogeographic patterns of the Buff-browed Foliage-gleaner (Syndactyla rufosuperciliata). This species…
Grad student Jake Berv and colleagues have published a new perspective piece as a PeerJ pre-print. Several recent studies have identified portions of the avian tree of life that are particularly hard to reconstruct — perhaps as a consequence of particularly rapid evolution after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. One issue…
Many International visitors from Argentina, Brazil and Chile came to the Fuller Evolutionary biology lab in 2018 to work on the genomics of birds. These studies included phylogeographic projects, genotype phenotype associations and landscape genetics. For more information on Pablo Lavina, Belén Bukowski, Cecilia Estalles, Nicolás Lois, Ramiro Arrieta, Juan…
PhD student Natalie Hofmeister visited her collaborators Lee Ann Rollins and Katarina Stuart at the University of New South Wales in Sydney in October and November 2018. Together, they’re working on several projects to compare European starling invasions across continents: stay tuned for the fruits of this research in 2019!…
Congratulations to Amelia Demery for winning the ‘best presentation by a first-year graduate student’ award at the 2018 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department Symposium!
A paper lead-authored by postdoc Daniel Hooper is out now in Molecular Ecology where you can read about how ‘Sex Chromosome Inversions Enforce Reproductive Isolation Across An Avian Hybrid Zone’. This paper, focused on the hybrid zone in northern Australia between subspecies of the long-tailed finch (Poephila acuticauda), is one…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently received recognition from the Cornell Office of Postdoctoral Studies. Dave received the 2018 ‘Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring’, in recognition of his work in leading the “Current Topics in Non-Model Genomics” discussion group, and his role in undergraduate education.
Were Australia’s lyrebirds the first ‘meme generators’? By Pat Leonard September 17, 2018 Australia’s Superb Lyrebird – the most astonishing animal mimic in the world – has been communicating with memes through song and dance for millions of years. “These days we usually think of memes as bits of culture…