Postdoc Nati Garcia presented a talk at the AOS conference here in Anchorage on the processes of differentiation in two pairs of Empidonax flycatchers, birds that are notorious for being essentially identical in appearance yet different in song. Nati’s two pairs differ greatly in the degree of genomic separation among…
Congratulations to Jake Berv, who defended his PhD and then rolled right into the Cornell graduation ceremony. Jake’s work has focused on processes of differentiation in birds, ranging from recent patterns of phylogeographic differentiation in tropical manakins all the way to the deepest parts of the avian tree of life…
Sophomore undergrad Kelsie Lopez presented an impressive poster at this weeks Cornell Undergraduate Research Board symposium, featuring the work she has done under the mentorship of postdoc Daniel Hooper. Kelsie’s project examined the pattern of mitochondrial DNA variation across a finch hybrid zone in northern Australia.
Undergrad Chloe Mikles presented her work on the genomic divergence of song sparrows around San Francisco Bay at the Spring meeting of the Cornell Chapters of the American Fisheries Society and the Wildlife Society. Chloe’s talk was part of a mini-session preview of the joint society meeting in Reno this…
In June and July of 2018, Irby and a team from the Lab and the USFWS worked on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, which is the only breeding location of McKay’s Bunting and by some measures the most remote location in the 50 states. Our Living Bird article…
Just posted on BioaRxiv, a pre-print of our new findings on genes associated with migration in warblers: Selection on VPS13A linked to long-distance migratory behavior in a songbird David P. L. Toews, Scott A. Taylor, Henry M. Streby, Gunnar R. Kramer, Irby J. Lovette Abstract Animal migration demands an interconnected…
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…