Postdocs Scott Taylor and Leo Campagna have a substantial commentary appearing in this week’s issue of Science (!) on avian supergenes, as exemplified by recent studies of ruffs and white-throated sparrows. Read it here: TaylorCampagnaScienceAvianSupergenes
Video highlights from our January 2016 field course in Patagonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9jGu7ErMsE
Congratulations to grad student Natalie Hofmeister for winning the first-year award for best presentation at the 40th annual Cornell EEB research symposium. Natalie talked about her MS project on Environmental fluctuations influence the evolution of the glucocorticoid receptor in African starlings.
Postdocs David Toews and Scott Taylor gave a riveting hour-long, interactive presentation to the Lab of Ornithology board on the genomics of speciation in warblers. Despite the highly technical nature of their topic, they were able to explain their studies and findings in language that was totally accessible to this…
Our lab group was fantastically well represented in a series of 35 short but powerful presentations by undergraduates and graduate students at the Lab of Ornithology Fall board meeting, which was also part of the Lab’s celebration of its 100th birthday. Thanks and congratulations to everyone involved for doing such…
Congratulations to grad student Jake Berv for being awarded a Graduate Student Research Award from the Society of Systematic Biologists in support of Jake’s studies of the phylogeographic history of various Neotropical birds.
Leo Campagna and I are finishing up our trip to Patagonia, where we are setting up logistics for our forthcoming field course and generally having a great time with both wildlife and Leo’s friends and family here in his home town of Puerto Madryn. Right whales, elephant seals, guanacos, grisson,…
Irby appointed as Fuller Professor of Ornithology: This is old news in some ways, but the Cornell Chronicle just ran an article about the new Fuller Chair of Ornithology: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/10/fuller-gift-keeps-lab-ornithology-soaring. I’m very proud to be associated in this role with Larry and Nancy Fuller, who have long been such staunch…
Required reading on avian genomics… Marshaling a diverse group of co-authors, post-docs Dave Toews, Scott Taylor and Leonardo Campagna spearheaded the publication of a new synthetic review in the Auk: Ornithological Advances on genomic applications in avian systems. Lab PhD students Nicolas Mason and Petra Deane-Coe are also co-authors on…
How to prepare for a trip to Patagonia: (1) get Leo (from Argentina) to agree to be master chef/jefe de asado; (2) obtain two sheep; (3) watch Leo chase sheep around pasture; (4) humanely dispatch and partly deconstruct said sheep; (4) invite the lab group plus 100 other people over…
Here is just a small sample of links to third-party commentaries and articles on Jake’s avian phylogeny study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15638.html http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/07/us-science-birds-idUSKCN0S124U20151007 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15638.html http://www.voanews.com/content/scientists-unveil-comprehensive-bird-family-tree/2995915.html
Congratulations to grad student Jake Berv and his co-authors for their important paper on the avian tree of life, which came out this week in Nature! The paper is open-access and the link is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15697.html A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing Although reconstruction of…
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar: Scott was in Washington DC this Friday to give a seminar as part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar Series. His seminar, titled “Chickadees and climate change: Ecological and evolutionary insights from common backyard birds” highlighted some of the work he has been doing…
Congrats to postdoc Leo Campagna for making the cover of Molecular Ecology with his most recent research paper on seedeaters!
Our crew at AOU: Scott, David, Leo, and Nick:
Postdoc David Toews gave his talk at AOU/COS on Extensive biogeographic introgression and weak genomic divergence between phenotypically distinct wood warblers. This collaborative project is using new genomic tools to better understand the dynamics of hybridization between golden-winged and blue-winged warblers. The new data confirm that hybridization is likely facilitating…
Postdoc Scott Taylor just gave a talk at AOU/COS on A comparative transcriptomic approach for understanding low hybrid fitness in chickadees. Summary: Comparing the transcriptomes of Black-capped, Carolina, and Mountain chickadees has provided support for our hypothesis that a breakdown in aerobic capacity in hybrid chickadees may be the underlying…
Postdoc Leo Campagna presented his work at the AOU/COS conference in Norman, Oklahoma. Leo uses genomic tools to understand the evolution of capuchino seedeaters, and has documented the complex demographic history that has led to this incredible radiation of birds, including an extremely large ancestral effective population size at the…
Nick Mason’s talk at AOU/COS: Grad student Nick Mason talked today about his comparative work on avian vocalizations, in a talk titled Evolutionary rate heterogeneity among learned and innate vocalizations across two prominent clades of Neotropical passerines (Thraupidae, Furnariidae). Those are tanagers and woodcreepers to those of you who might…
Nick Mason is everywhere at AOU/COS…: Grad student Nick Mason is engaged in a busy AOU/COS conference. Yesterday he led a workshop for 25 people on using R (the field’s main statistics+ programming resource) in Ornithology, today he is giving a research talk, tomorrow he is MCing the famous evening…