“Is he a postdoc or a PhD student?”: Ben Van Doren, who graduated from Cornell just this past May and who is shortly off to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, gave an in-depth presentation at the NAOC on his comparative genomic study of stonechats from populations across Eurasia and Africa.…
Winged warblers: the story is out! David Toews’ presentation on the work he and Scott Taylor have led on the genomics of Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers played to a standing-room-only audience at the North American Ornithological Conference yesterday, and apparently there were many dozens of additional people left outside who…
Evolution2016: Jake Berv gave a talk entitled “The genomic signature of the lilliput effect across the K/PG mass extinction” at the Evolution conference in Austin.
Evolution2016: Recent graduate Ben Van Doren presented a poster at the Evolution Conference on his studies of comparative genomics in the stonechat complex.
Evolution2016: Postdoc Jen Walsh presented a poster at the 2016 Evolution conference on “Signals of Adaptive Variation in Fresh and Salt Water Populations of Ammodramus Sparrows: Defining Conservation Units Based on Evolutionary Potential” as part of her ongoing research on how these sparrows have adapted (or not) to different environments…
Evolution2016: Grad student Natalie Hofmeister gave a talk on how birds cope with and adapt to environmental variability, titled “Environmental fluctuations influence the evolution of the glucocorticoid receptor in African starlings.” She found that starling lineages that experience greater variance in rainfall show lower rates of substitution in this stress…
Evolution2016: Leo presented on the genomic landscape of differentiation in capuchino seedeaters at the Evolution conference in Austin, TX. The Capuchino’s have shown very little genetic differences in previous studies, but using data from whole genome sequencing we were able to find narrow divergence peaks among species. Many of these…
Postdoc Dave Toews presented the ongoing research in the lab on the genomic consequences of hybridization between golden-winged and blue-winged warblers, which he is working on closely with postdoc Scott Taylor and others. David described how there are only a few genomic regions that differ between these taxa and that…
Congratulations to Scott Taylor for garnering the Don Abbott Postdoctoral Research Award for an outstanding contributed presentation (talk or poster) by a current postdoc at the American Society of Naturalists meeting in mid-January. As seen in this photo, a widespread power failure required Scott to gave his talk on the…
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.
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…
Jake on manakin phylogeography at Neotropical Ornithology Congress: grad student Jake Berv talked yesterday at the NOC in Manaus (Brazil) about his studies of genetic and song variation in the White-crowned Manakin complex.
Luciano Calderón at Argentina Evolution conference: visiting Lab researcher Luciano Calderón is talking today at the first-ever Argentine Evolution meeting (I Reunion Argentina de Biología Evolutiva, in Cordoba, Argentina) about the population genomics of turtle doves across Europe. Luciano visited Cornell in February and worked with postdoc Leo Campagna to…
David’s talk at Evolution: genomics of hybridizing warblers. Postdoc David Toews’ talk at the Evolution conference in Brazil covered his ongoing work on the hybridization genomics of the Myrtle and Audubon’s forms of Yellow-rumped Warblers, and on admixture mapping that is revealing interesting candidate genes for traits that differ between…
Jake’s talk at Evolution: phylogenomics of all birds. Jake Berv’s talk at the evolution meeting was on “A Fully Resolved, Comprehensive Phylogeny of Birds (Aves) using Targeted Next Generation DNA Sequencing.” In it, Jake covered his forthcoming paper on relationships within Neoaves, and on the datasets and analysis methods that…