Postdoc Dave Toews recently received recognition from the Cornell Office of Postdoctoral Studies. Dave received the 2018 ‘Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring’, in recognition of his work in leading the “Current Topics in Non-Model Genomics” discussion group, and his role in undergraduate education.
Lots of familiar faces in this photo of 15 (of 24 total at the moment!) Lab of Ornithology postdocs who recently gathered to help welcome newcomer Ryan Germain:
Postdoc David Toews gave one of the very last talks at the American Ornithological Society conference today, in which he explored how the costs of migration might limit the western breeding ranges of warblers that next in the boreal zone of Canada and Alaska.
Be sure to catch this presentation if you are going to be at AOS in East Lansing next week! 😉
The current members of our lab group who are at the Evolution meeting in Portland this week: Leo Campagna, Nick Mason, Gavin Leighton, David Toews, Petra Deane-Coe, Shawn Billerman, Jen Walsh, Stepfanie Aguillon, and Eliot Miller. Add in a few talks by researchers from other countries who visited our lab…
Postdoc Dave Toews gave a second talk today at the Evolution conferenece, in which he discussed cases of mitochondrial and nuclear discordance in warblers: In yellow-rumped warblers where mitochondrial DNA has introgressed between two forms, and in golden and blue-winged warblers, where mitochondrial DNA is distinct in the face of…
Postdoc David Toews gave a 5-minute blitz talk today at the Evolution conference on the topic of “How hybridization structures the genomes of related birds”.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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:
Happy SNEEB to all: Our lab group joined with the Lab of Ornithology postdocs more generally to host the inaugural Fall semester SNEEB (the Friday social hour for departments with the prior names of Systematics and Ecology, Entomology, and Neurobiology and Behavior…) last evening. Took a little more pre-planning than…
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…
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…
Graduate students Petra Deane-Coe, Stepfanie Aguillon, and Natalie Hofmeister led a workshop in ornithology and evolution for 9th-grade girls from across New York as part of Cornell’s Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Conference this past Saturday. Stepfanie managed a hands-on bird-banding demonstration while lab members Jen Walsh, Dave Toews, and Sahas Barve…