Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister just returned from a pilot field season chasing after Imperial Shags in Patagonia, and she’s now even more eager to return for another season of sampling. This project may grow into her dissertation, focusing on population structure and salt tolerance in (Phalacrocorax atriceps) near Ushuaia, Tierra…
We are fortunate that Daniel Hooper has been awarded one of this year’s Rose Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Lab of Ornithology! Daniel is currently finishing up his PhD at the University of Chicago, where he is working with his advisor Trevor Price on the evolution of chromosomal inversions and their…
Big congratulations to Jake Berv for the news that his NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant has been recommended for funding! Jake’s proposal is titled Surviving the K/Pg Mass Extinction: the genome as a life history character in birds and it includes innovative empirical and modeling approaches applied to the avian…
Postdoc Shawn Billerman has a new paper out in The Auk based on his PhD work with his advisor Matt Carling (himself a former postdoc here) at the University of Wyoming. The punch-line of this study has to do with their finding that Red-naped Sapsuckers are more aggressive towards simulated…
Our lab group enjoyed an all-day retreat today, with a break to attend the Lab of Ornithology holiday party. We covered lots of ground in discussing research, outreach, and professional development topics. But perhaps the most important outcome of the sillier part of the late afternoon was the anointing of…
Semesters always end with a somewhat bittersweet feeling, as classes come to a close and thoughts turn to exams and then to activities over the forthcoming break. My thanks to the 25 different people who presented in Ornithology Seminar (Bioee7800) this Fall, and to the many regular weekly participants (audience…
Congratulations to Stepfanie Aguillon for passing her oral A exam and thereby advancing to PhD candidacy! As is typical of this academic rite-of-passage, Stepfanie’s exam covered a variety of topics related (closely or distantly) to her dissertation work on the genomics and behavioral ecology of hybridization. It turned into a…
Congratulations to Natalie Hoffmeister for passing her PhD candidacy exam (here we call it the “A exam”) in great shape on Thursday. Like all A exams in the Field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natalie’s was an oral exam that covered a wide (and unpredictable) range of topics, in this…
On November 12 Jake Berv gave the Larry King Memorial Lecture to a sold out audience at the Rochester Academy of Sciences Fall Paper Session, held at Roberts Wesleyan College. Jake’s lecture, entitled, “Surviving the Mass Extinction: The Amazing Story of Bird Recovery and Radiation after the End-Cretaceous Catastrophe” focused…
We are all very excited that Shawn Billerman has just arrived back at the Lab in his new role as an NSF postdoctoral fellow! Shawn will be working on the genomics of birds that hybridize in the Great Plains region, taking advantage of the extensive collections from that region that…
Natalie was invited to present on the AAUW-funded project “Empowering Women in STEM” at the board meeting for the American Association of University Women’s New York Chapter. She and other members of the executive board of GWiS Ithaca traveled to Albany on Saturday to discuss this project and their plans…
Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister is one of the leaders of a collaborative team from across Cornell that just received a substantial grant for a project entitled “Empowering Women in STEM to Lead through Inclusive Practice and Community Building.” After completing Cornell’s first Intergroup Dialogue course for graduate students, Natalie wanted…
Visiting scientist Luciano Caldarón, our own Leo Campagna, and a cadre of collaborators just published a paper showing that the European Turtle Dove shows genetic evidence of a fluctuating demography over time, and is currently undergoing a shrinking phase. The combined effect of demography, habitat destruction and hunting is causing…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently presented on warbler genomics at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center as an invited speaker. Dave got to tour their well appointed genomics facility and met with the researchers and post docs interested in avian genomics and conservation.
Lab of Ornithology postdoc (and first author) Rusty Ligon and grad student Nick Mason are part of a team that just published a neat paper on the evolution of plumage coloration among finches: Ligon, R. A., Simpson, R. K., Mason, N. A., Hill, G. E., & McGraw, K. J. (2016).…
Postdoc Jen Walsh just returned from a very successful trip to southern California, where she was sampling birds like this salt-marsh-dwelling Savannah Sparrow as part of her broader project on avian adaptations to extreme and challenging environments.
I’m tardy to post here that postdoc Dave Toews recently published an ornithologically quite noteworthy paper in the Auk: Ornithological Advances from his PhD work at the University of British Columbia with Darren Irwin. Their study found evidence of strongly heterogeneous genomic divergence between a number of groups in the…
Here’s a shot of David and Canadian Minister of Science Dr. Kirsty Duncan at a reception in Ottawa this week in honor of the current cohort of Banting Postdoctoral Scholars:
This week Jake Berv presented his work on the avian mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary to the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. Jake’s recent work has focused on how genomes evolve in response to mass extinctions that select for life history traits. This was our lab’s first-ever…
Nick on AOS professional society trends and challenges: Graduate student Nick Mason is the lead author on a paper out today that reports on a wide spectrum of trends and challenges related to membership in the American Ornithological Society. This survey was a major undertaking, the analyses are robust, and…