Many members of our greater lab group spent yesterday birding in and around Sierra Vista in far southern Arizona. After enjoying Painted Redstarts, Arizona Woodpeckers, Buff-breasted Flycatchers, Vermilion Flycatchers, and dozens of other great birds, we gathered for the afternoon at the Aguillon family home for a wonderful BBQ, with…
Irby Lovette, Natalie Hoffmeister, and Liz Clayton Fuller just returned from teaching the field component of our three-course Galápagos curriculum, now in its 7th year. This year’s trip seemed to be characterized by sexual selection in action: giant tortoises loudly mating, blue-footed boobies dancing, marine iguana females battling over nesting…
A warm welcome to Dr. Natalia Garcia, who is joining our lab for six months as a postdoc. Natalia is broadly interested in the evolution of acoustic and visual communication in birds, and she has studied the effect of morphological constraints in the evolution of communication signals and the evolutionary…
Postdoc Jen Walsh co-authored a new paper in the Auk with collaborators from the University of New Hampshire looking at adaptive sex ratio manipulation in Saltmarsh Sparrows. The authors determined the sex of 990 offspring from 370 nests and characterized variation in site- and population-level sex ratios. They found no…
Irby Lovette just began a three-year term as the incoming Director of the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates, the home of the research collections that are co-located with the Lab in the Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity. The CUMV is small in terms of staff — just three additional professionals…
Congratulations to graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon for being awarded the 2018 Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. This Cornell-wide award recognizes “demonstrated excellence and dedication in instructional responsibilities to students at Cornell University, thereby enhancing undergraduate and graduate education at Cornell.” Stepfanie has been deeply engaged in teaching evolutionary biology…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon participated in the first ever general ornithology twitter conference (#BOU17TC), organized by the British Ornithologists’ Union. She had the challenge of translating her recent paper on spatial genetic patterns in Florida Scrub-Jays into 6 (very short) tweets. Twitter conferences are fairly new, but a great avenue…
Lots of familiar faces in this photo of 15 (of 24 total at the moment!) Lab of Ornithology postdocs who recently gathered to help welcome newcomer Ryan Germain:
Postdocs Shawn Billerman and Jen Walsh were invited to present their research at a NSF sponsored collections-science symposium at Harvard this past week. Shawn presented on climate niches of Great Plains hybrids and Jen presented on using sampling replication to understand selective versus demographic process in shaping genomic patterns.
Postdoc Dave Toews has a new paper out in Proceeding B on using admixture mapping in the myrtle – Audubon’s hybrid zone to identify genomic regions associated with distinct plumage characters. Dave and his co-authors identified several genomic regions associated with feather patches that differ between the warblers based on…
Warmest of congratulations to Nick for successfully defending his PhD thesis yesterday! Nick by the numbers (at least some of them): 5.2 years as a PhD student (1 year below the average time-to-completion); 1/1 on postdoc applications with his independent NSF award to work at UC Berkeley starting in January;…
Just-arrived postdoc Daniel Hooper has a paper from his dissertation newly out in Nature Ecology and Evolution entitled Chromosomal inversion differences correlate with range overlap in passerine birds. Abstract is copied below, but his ‘behind the paper’ article in the same issue is also very much worth a read. Abstract:…
A very warm welcome to the newest member of our lab group, Dr. Daniel Hooper, who arrived today as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow. Daniel (at far right in the photo) did his PhD work at the University of Chicago under the advising of Trevor Price; among other topics, Daniel has…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s paper is featured on the cover of the current issue of PLOS Genetics. Here is what that journal has to say about her contribution: Florida Scrub-Jays reveal new details about isolation-by-distance. The pattern of isolation-by-distance is observed often in nature, but we rarely have means to…
PhD student Jake Berv is in Puetro Iguazú, Argentina, at the Ornithological Congress of the Americas this week, presenting his work on the population genomics of the white crowned manakin. Jake’s work on this taxon takes advantage of new techniques being optimized in the Fuller lab to understand diversification in…
Warmest of congratulations to grad student Nick Mason for ending his final AOS conference as a student on a high note by winning an AOS Council Presentation Award for his very well-received talk on “Song Evolution, Vocal Learning, and Speciation in Passerine Birds.” Way to go, Nick!
The Cornell undergraduate contingent continued a tradition of performing impressively at this year’s AOS conference. Among the highlights was the crushing victory of the 2/3 Cornell undergraduate team (plus one undergrad from that four-letter-word-staring-with-Y Ivy…guess they know a bit about birds over in New Haven) in the venerable quiz bowl…
A host of people affiliated with our group were voted in as Elected Members of the American Ornithology Society this year. Warmest of congratulations (!!!) to our current Lab of Ornithology colleagues Nick Mason, Emma Greig, Leo Campagna, and Karan Odom, and similarly to Chris Balakrishnan, Karl Berg, Sarah Kaiser,…
Postdoc David Toews gave one of the very last talks at the American Ornithological Society conference today, in which he explored how the costs of migration might limit the western breeding ranges of warblers that next in the boreal zone of Canada and Alaska.
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s newest paper is now out in the journal PLOS Genetics — where it was released just 1.5 hours before she gave a talk on it at the AOS conference at Michigan State. The paper titled “Deconstructing isolation-by-distance: The genomic consequences of limited dispersal” shows how the…