Cornell researchers past and present were everywhere in this year’s presentations at the American Ornithological Society meeting in Tuscon, including these strong contributions by current or very recent members of our own core lab group: Graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon led off with her strong talk on how “genomic data provide…
Warmest of congratulations to recently degreed Dr. Nick Mason for being recognized with the 2018 Marion Jenkins Award by the AOS! This award recognizes “an early or mid career ornithologist who has performed continued extensive service to the society, which includes holding elected offices but emphasizes volunteered contributions and committee…
We were surprised and delighted to find that our 2015 phylogeny paper in the Auk has won the first Brina Kessel Award, which will be given every two years to recognize “an outstanding paper published in the four preceding years in The Auk.” A fun element of the backstory is…
Congratulations to Dr. Jen Walsh, a postdoc in our lab group, for being voted in as an Elective Member of the American Ornithological Society. This professional honor is based on having made “significant contributions to ornithology,” which Jen has certainly done through her large body of research and through mentoring…
Congratulations to Dr. Scott Taylor, until recently a postdoc in our lab and now an assistant professor at U. Colorado, for winning the 2018 Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award, which recognizes “outstanding and promising work by a researcher early in his or her career in any field of ornithology.” Scott’s…
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…
Undergraduate Chloe Mikles prepared and submitted her first ddRAD-seq library for sequencing. It’s crazy to go from so many blood samples and DNA extractions to 8 index groups and finally to one tiny tube for sequencing. Looking forward to lots of data to analyze!
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…
Leo Campagna organizes a full day symposium to showcase the latest genomic advances in Neotropical taxa. The symposium featured 14 talks given by people from five different countries on phylogenomics, deep scale phylogenetics and phenotype/genotype associations. The list of presentations included Jake Berv and Leo Campagna (x2) from our lab,…
Not related to research but too good not to post here: Postdoc Jen Walsh using duct tape to keep a bandage on the foot of her pet duck:
Sebastián Cabanne gave a talk today at the Evolution meetings in Portland on the historical phylogeography of the atlantic forest and andean forest biomes. He used data generated in part in our lab during two visits (2014 and 2016) to study patterns of isolation and connectivity in two co-distributed passerines.…
Postdoc Dave Toews provides some perspective in a “News and Views” article in the journal Molecular Ecology on new behavioral research in the white-throated sparrow conducgted by Sara Lipshutz (in Elizabeth Derryberry’s lab at Tulane), which compared bioacoustic variation across a contact zone between two white-throated sparrow subspecies. White-throated sparrows…
Leo’s paper in Science Advances is getting lots of really great press coverage, notably this article and accompanying video by James Gorman in the New York Times, this post for Forbes by the anonymous but well regarded blogger GrrlScientist, and coverage on Spanish and Portuguese media though collaborators in Argentina…
A paper on a project led by Leo Campagna and involving collaborators from the USA, Brazil, and Argentina is out today in Science Advances. This paper shows how a small number of genes that control plumage traits have been under repeated selection (probably via sexual selection) to produce the amazing…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently published a paper in the Journal of Avian Biology on why some warblers might not nest further into the northwest; All About Birds has a write-up on the work here. Dave shows that there is likely suitable habitat for several wood warbler species at high latitudes in…
The Magic School Bus — the science education television show — is getting a reboot, and grad student Jake Berv (maybe the kid with the red hat in the image here???) contributed substantial scientific feedback to the script for one of the forthcoming episodes. Look for Jake’s name in the…
Petra jumped over the final obstacle towards her PhD by passing her oral review with ease — in fact it was a fun discussion about her science and discoveries on her swamp sparrow system through which Petra has discovered the genes involved in this special case of rapid adaptation to…