Our crew at AOU: Scott, David, Leo, and Nick
Our crew at AOU: Scott, David, Leo, and Nick:
Category: Nick Mason
Nick Mason’s talk at AOU/COS
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…
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…
Current lab members in Guarujá
Current lab members in Guarujá: six of our current lab members are presenting their research this week at the Evolution conference in Guarujá, Brazil: (from left to right) Jake Berv, David Toews, Stepfane Aguillon, Leo Campagna, Scott Taylor, and Nick Mason. By all reports, their talks and presentations have all…
Ben and Nick on tropical woodpeckers and oaks
Graduate students Ben Freeman and Nick Mason have a new paper out in PLOS ONE: Freeman BG, Mason NA (2015) The Geographic Distribution of a Tropical Montane Bird Is Limited by a Tree: Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) and Colombian Oaks (Quercus humboldtii) in the Northern Andes. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128675.…
Redpolls hit the news, part III
Redpolls hit the news, part III … Nick and Scott’s redpoll study has been available for a while in Molecular Ecology’s pre-publication website and it has garnered an impressive amount of outside attention, including coverage in the news section of Science (http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/17_april_2015?pg=44#pg44), and various popular media outlets and blogs like…
Redpoll study hits the news, part I
Redpoll study hits the news, part I… The paper on redpoll genomics and transcriptomics by grad Nick Mason and postdoc Scott Taylor is now published in Molecular Ecology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.13140/abstract
Redpoll study hits the news, part II
Redpoll study hits the news, part II… Nick and Scott’s redpoll paper was paired with a nice commentary piece by Jan Lifjeld at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.13244/full … “… Mason & Taylor (2015), using a large data set of genomewide SNPs, verify that [the redpolls] all belong to a single gene pool with…
Galapagos 2015 student trip video
Travelogue video from our Spring 2015 Galapagos courses for freshmen — these include a trip through the archipelago as well as intensive coverage of evolutionary biology (BioEE1780, 5 credits) and the humanities (through a writing course centered on the perspectives of different travelers on Galapagos, WRIT1430, 3 credits). Courses and…
Leo and Nick teach Genomics in Mexico City
Two members of our group–Postdoc Leo Campagna and PhD student Nick Mason–just returned from leading a special multi-day genomics course at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Their course, taught in Spanish to a large and enthusiastic cadre of students and researchers, was an “Introducción a los…
Back from Galapagos…
Irby just returned from the Galapagos after helping to lead the 2015 ‘Galapagos Curriculum’ for 12 Cornell freshmen, in partnership with grad students Nick Mason and Lina Arcila. As the students returned to campus, Irby stayed on to lead two very fun voyages around the archipelago for Lab of Ornithology…
Galapagos update
Nick is back from Galapagos along with the 12 freshmen in our “Galapagos curriculum,” an 8-credit series of Humanities and Science courses that includes the Spring Break trip to the Galapagos. Irby carries on in Galapagos leading two back-to-back trips for Lab of Ornithology members.
Irby and Nick are in Galapagos
Irby and Nick are spending the first week of April (i.e., Spring Break) in Galapagos along with the 12 Cornell freshmen enrolled in our two-course Galapagos curriculum. Boobies, tortoises, finches, penguins, iguanas, and much more await!
Congratulations to Nick for a Student Research Fellowship from ASN
Congratulations to Nick Mason for winning an American Society of Naturalists Student Research Fellowship!
Congrats to three grads on Mellon Grant awards
Congratulations to grads Stepfanie Aguillon, Jake Berv, and Nick Mason, all of whom were awarded research grants from the CALS Mellon awards program in support of their different projects.
Important new paper on redpoll finch genomics
Nick Mason and Scott Taylor have an (I think) important new paper coming out in Molecular Ecology on the lack of genetic differentiation, but presence of gene expression differences, among redpoll finch “species.” The online-early version is here. Stay tuned for more posts on this study, complete with press releases.…
Nick’s tanager vocalization paper is out
Mason, N. A., & Burns, K. J. (2015). The effect of habitat and body size on the evolution of vocal displays in Thraupidae (tanagers), the largest family of songbirds. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 114, 38–551
Congrats to Nick on new research funding
Congratuations to Nick for garnering a substantial research grant from the Sustainable Biodiversity Fund of Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future to support his work on birds in the Imperial Valley of California.
Congrats to Nick for Outstanding Teaching
Congratulations to grad student Nick Mason for winning the Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, which recognizes an outstanding TAs who has demonstrated excellence and dedication in their instructional responsibilities. This university-wide award honors the important contributions made by teaching assistants towards enhancing undergraduate and graduate education at Cornell University.…
A fleeting welcome to Arturo Olvera Vital from UNAM
Bienvenidos to Arturo Olvera Vital, who is here on a one-day visit as part of a tour of many avian specimen collections. Arturo is a student in Adolfo Navarro’s lab at UNAM, and he is collaborating with our graduate student Nick Mason on studies of Sporophila torqueola.