Congratulations to graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon for being awarded the 2018 Cornelia Ye Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. This Cornell-wide award recognizes “demonstrated excellence and dedication in instructional responsibilities to students at Cornell University, thereby enhancing undergraduate and graduate education at Cornell.” Stepfanie has been deeply engaged in teaching evolutionary biology…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon participated in the first ever general ornithology twitter conference (#BOU17TC), organized by the British Ornithologists’ Union. She had the challenge of translating her recent paper on spatial genetic patterns in Florida Scrub-Jays into 6 (very short) tweets. Twitter conferences are fairly new, but a great avenue…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s paper is featured on the cover of the current issue of PLOS Genetics. Here is what that journal has to say about her contribution: Florida Scrub-Jays reveal new details about isolation-by-distance. The pattern of isolation-by-distance is observed often in nature, but we rarely have means to…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s newest paper is now out in the journal PLOS Genetics — where it was released just 1.5 hours before she gave a talk on it at the AOS conference at Michigan State. The paper titled “Deconstructing isolation-by-distance: The genomic consequences of limited dispersal” shows how the…
Stepfanie Aguillon presented yesterday at AOS on a “side” (but major) research project on limited dispersal and isolation-by-distance in Florida Scrub-Jays. Stepfanie started this as a rotation project when she first arrived at Cornell in collaboration with Nancy Chen. The paper is available today on PLOS Genetics (http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006911). This study…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon sent along this link to where her poster is featured on a site about scientific poster design and communication. I’m flagging it here both because the expert at the site found only a few things to tweak on Stepfanie’s work, and because the site itself is…
PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon is this month’s featured scientist on our graduate student association home page — http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/grads/ — which is worth checking out both to read about Stepfanie and because the site as a whole is indicative of the strength of our graduate program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
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…
Graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon presented a poster at the Evolution conference on her genomic investigations into the hybrid zone of yellow-shafted x red-shafted flickers. Contrary to all previous forays on this topic, Stepfanie is finding markers that differentiate these forms and that may be associated with their color differences and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Congratulations to Stepfanie Aguillon for passing her oral A exam and thereby advancing to PhD candidacy! As is typical of this academic rite-of-passage, Stepfanie’s exam covered a variety of topics related (closely or distantly) to her dissertation work on the genomics and behavioral ecology of hybridization. It turned into a…
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…
Stepfanie on Northern Flicker genomics: at the NAOC conference a day ago, PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon presented on her ongoing field and genomic studies of the great plains hybrid zone between yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers. Even though these two forms are distinct in many plumage traits even beyond their namesake…
Stepfanie and Brianna in the field: Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and rising sophomore Brianna Mims spent much of the summer chasing flickers across their hybrid zone in the Great Plains. Here are a few photos of these field researchers and their birds:
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…
Grants to Grads: congratulations to graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister for a substantial travel award from the Einaudi Center for International Studies for her forthcoming pilot study of local adaptation in Argentinian seabirds, and similar congratulations to graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon for a substantial Peacock Award from the Garden Society of…