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Our 2018 South American Visitors

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…

Natalie invades Australia

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!…

Amelia wins best presentation award

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!

Nati on sparrow songs at the International Ornithological Congress

Postdoc Natalia Garcia presented the first results of a project studying vocal performance in the Rufous-collared Sparrow (Zonotrichia capensis). This species shows vocal dialects that, contrary to what happens in other Zonotrichia species, seem to be shaped by habitat type: their song trills are slower in closed environments and are…

Dave on warblers at International Ornithological Congress

At the IOC this week Postdoc Dave Toews presented new golden-winged and blue-winged warbler genomic results. Data come from over 100 re-seqeunced genomes sampled across the range of both groups. He discussed finding some genomic ‘weirdos’ in Appalachia that appear to ‘genomic relicts’, somehow avoiding admixture. He also announced recruitment…

Really Big News about our Littlest Lab Group Member!

Enormous congratulations to postdoc Jen Walsh and her husband Marc on the birth of their first child, Griffin Leo Emond!!!! We are greatly looking forward to having this very cute little guy join our lab group events when the time comes, and wish Jen and Marc all the best as they experience the innumerable joys of parenthood!

Jake wins SSB Publisher’s Award for Best Paper!

Congratulations to PhD candidate Jake Berv for winning the 2017 Publisher’s Award for the best paper authored by a student in the journal Systematic Biology. Jake won this honor for his paper on the Genomic Signature of an Avian Lilliput Effect across the K-Pg Extinction, and the award was presented…

Evolution 2018 in Montpellier!

The second joint congress of Evolutionary Biology started in Montpellier, France. This meeting brings together the European Society for Evolutionary Biology with the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists. On the first day, graduate student Jacob Berv gave a presentation…

NSF, Lyrebirds, ComicCon, and Fantastic Beasts!

We think it is really, really neat that our colleagues at the National Science Foundation are featuring our newly funded project on cultural and genetic evolution in lyrebirds at their exhibit on real-life “Fantastic Beasts and where to find them” at the San Diego ComicCon! — thereby taking public outreach…

St. Matthew Island expedition: McKay’s Buntings and much more

Irby just returned from a month-long adventure on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. This island is the most remote location in the 50 United States as measured from its distance to the nearest permanent human settlement. The trip was a partnership between the Lab’s Conservation Media Program and…

New book chapter: Population Genomics of Birds: Evolutionary History and Conservation

Postdocs Dave Toews and Jen Walsh and Research Associate Leonardo Campagna have contributed a chapter on avian genomics to the new population genomics book series. The chapter reviews conceptual advances of avian genomics, along with key examples from the literature. The authors review the utility of genome-wide data in addressing…

Capuchino seedeaters hybridize in captivity and produce novel plumage patterns

Research Associate Leonardo Campagna published a new study in PLOS ONE analyzing capuchino seedeater data gathered by aviculturists over more than a decade. Capuchino’s are common cage birds in South America and will breed in captivity, or under the right conditions, hybridize. The study compares the viability of F1 capuchino…

Small class sizes reduce performance gaps in STEM

Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon co-authored a new paper with collaborators from multiple institutions (led by former Cornell EEB postdoc Dr. Cissy Ballen) looking at the influence of class size on performance of women and underrepresented minority (URM) students in STEM classes. They found that small class sizes reduce gaps in…

50 years of bird research at Hubbard Brook

Over the past weekend Irby joined a large group of project alumni to celebrate the bird research program that has run continuously for half a century at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This project was initiated by Professor Dick Holmes, Irby’s undergraduate mentor…

Jake at SMBE in Yokohama

From July 8-13, graduate student Jake Berv attended the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) in Yokohama, Japan. The 2018 meeting celebrated 50 years of one of the founding ideas of molecular population genetics, The Neural Theory. Jake’s abstract was accepted for oral presentation in…

Stepfanie’s fieldwork in the Great Plains

Stepfanie recently completed three very successful weeks of fieldwork in Nebraska and Colorado with Vanya Rohwer, Tayler Brooks, and Augie Kramer to continue the CUMV’s work on the Great Plains hybrid zones. She has since extracted DNA, prepped, and sequenced 24 of the hybrid flickers for use in her next…

Stepfanie’s first dissertation chapter is out in The Auk

Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon authored a new paper in The Auk assessing the level of genetic differentiation between red-shafted, yellow-shafted, and gilded flickers. Up until now it was impossible to consistently differentiate these birds using genetics. Stepfanie looked at genomic patterns across much of the North American range and…

Goodbye to Belén Bukowski

After a busy four weeks in Ithaca, Belén who started with extractions of ~120 DNA samples has just one tube containing her ddRAD-seq library to be sequenced! Belén was visiting the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Lab as part of our International Scholar Research Support Program (ISRSP) and we wish Belén safe…

Differences in reproductive success coupled with assortative mating shape hybrid zone dynamics between Saltmarsh and Nelson’s sparrows

Postdoc Jen Walsh authored a new paper in the Auk looking at the role of divergent mating strategies, reproductive success, and compatibility in maintaining the Saltmarsh-Nelson’s sparrow hybrid zone. Looking at nesting and paternity data for 342 sparrows of both pure and hybrid origin, she found that F1-F2 hybrid males…

Stepfanie and grad diversity preview weekend featured by Grad School

The Cornell graduate school just posted an nice article about this year’s EEB graduate student diversity preview weekend, which was co-led by Stepfanie Aguillon from our lab group. This event is a stellar example of the graduate students self-organizing to work together in a targeted, highly effective way to increase…

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