Irby Lovette was honored with Cornell’s Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award during this past graduation weekend. The awards, which are given each year to four faculty from across the campus and which are Cornell’s highest recognition for advising, underscore of the importance of engagement with undergraduates and are based…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and her collaborators presented a poster this week at the national Teaching as Research Conference. Their study used undergraduates on our Introductory Evolutionary Biology course to explore gender-based differences in student participation. Among the main take-aways: male and female students interact differently in the classroom, with…
Congratulations to Petra (aka Dr. Deane-Coe) for graduating this past weekend with her PhD. It was very fun to see her walk on stage and get outfitted with the red hood that represents this high-level professional accomplishment!
We had a great semester of engagement with lots of Cornell undergraduates this Spring! In addition to the many less formal forms of instruction and mentoring to which everybody contributes, people from our group who were involved in official teaching and advising this semester included: Stepfanie Aguillion: Stepfanie led the…
Grad student Petra Deane-Coe presented her dissertation seminar at the EEB departmental seminar slot on April 24th. The title of her talk was “Genomic signatures of recent adaptive divergence in the swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana)” and her seminar itself was a model of clarity and polished presentation, on top of…
Congratulations to Nick Mason for being recognized as a recipient of the Stephen and Margaret Russell Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. This award celebrates those “who have demonstrated their devotion to teaching, where teaching is understood to include classroom presence, preparation and administration, student counseling…
This semester a bunch of us are involved in the 5th offering of the Galapagos curriculum for Cornell undergraduates, including a really wonderful voyage through the archipelago over Spring Break. Course leaders include Stepfanie Aguillon who is teaching the associated Freshman Writing Seminar, Natalie Hoffmeister who is teaching the Evolutionary…
Congratulations to grad student Nick Mason for being awarded a competitive NSF postdoctoral fellowship! This award will support Nick and his research starting in January 2018 as he transitions to working at UC Berkeley with ornithologist Raurie Bowie and others. The only down-side is that we will sorely miss Nick…
Leo Campagna was the featured presenter at the venerable Nuttall Ornithological Club’s April meeting in Cambridge, MA. His talk “The genetic basis of plumage differences in the rapid capuchino seedeater radiation” summarized results from the last few years of work on those birds. His study has identified key areas of…
Postdoc Dave Toews and lab alum Dr. Andrea Townsend (now a professor at Hamilton College) both gave plenary talks at Massachusetts Audubon “Birders” meeting in Boston this past weekend. The theme of this year was “warblers” and Dave discussed his research on hybridization in yellow-rumped as well as golden-winged and…
Spurred by several exciting findings in warblers and canaries, current lab members Dave Toews and Natalie Hoffmeister, and lab alum Scott Taylor, reviewed what is known about the evolution and genetics of carotenoid processing in animals in a paper just published in Trends in Genetics. Animals cannot synthesize carotenoids and…
Graduate student Nick Mason recently published a paper with lead author Cissy Ballen to examine the effects of a campus support program for underrepresented minorities, first-generation students, and women in biology: the Biology Scholars Program (BSP) at Cornell. Together, Cissy and Nick found evidence of a disparity in preparedness among…
Postdocs Jen Walsh and David Toews and Research Associate Leo Campagna are all currently presenting posters and talks at the Gordon Speciation Conference in Tuscany. They were also invited to a pre-conference seminar highlighting cool young investigators. This small conference, with approximately 120 attendees, is focused on the frontiers of…
Postdoc Jen Walsh and collaborators recently published a paper in Molecular Ecology investigating the genetic structure of the Saltmarsh-Nelson’s sparrow subspecies complex. Using a reduced representation sequencing approach coupled with morphological data, this study offers the first comprehensive view into subspecies variation within Saltmarsh and Nelson’s sparrows. The authors found…
Postdoc Jen Walsh and collaborators recently published a paper in Conservation Genetics investigating the temporal stability of the Saltmarsh-Nelson’s sparrow hybrid zone. By comparing genetic, morphological, and survey data from the same sites from two time periods (1998 and 2013), this study finds that Nelson’s Sparrows are moving further south…
We are back from two exciting weeks in Patagonia where Irby and Leo have led for the second consecutive year the field-course portion of “BioEE2525/BioEE2526 Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics”. Together with co-leaders Roxanne Razavi, David Toews, Natalia García and a group of 12 Cornell students, we…
Graduate student Nick Mason recently published a manuscript on damselfly behavioral ecology that appeared in Animal Behaviour. Nick’s manuscript is the product of his time with the Cornell Florida Field Course, which facilitates short research projects for graduate students at the Archbold Biological Field Station in south-central Florida. In this…
Graduate student Nick Mason and collaborators recently published a paper in Evolution about diversification, rates of song evolution, and vocal learning in passerine birds. By combining two large vocalization data sets, this study finds a positive association between accelerated bursts in speciation and vocal evolution. Furthermore, the authors find evidence…
The well-read Molecular Ecologist blog by Jeremy Yoder — which is loosely affiliated with the Molecular Ecology journal — just ran a really great commentary featuring a new paper posted on bioRxiv by grad student and lead author Stepfanie Aguillon. The title of the original paper is Deconstructing isolation-by-distance: the…
Postdoc Jen Walsh has been awarded a $12K seed grant in support of her work on the genomics of parallel adaptation in salt-marsh-dwelling sparrows. We are particularly grateful to the Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics for this specific award and more generally for creating an interactive network of scholars from…