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…
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…
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…
Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister just returned from a pilot field season chasing after Imperial Shags in Patagonia, and she’s now even more eager to return for another season of sampling. This project may grow into her dissertation, focusing on population structure and salt tolerance in (Phalacrocorax atriceps) near Ushuaia, Tierra…
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.
Postdoc Jen Walsh just returned from a very successful trip to southern California, where she was sampling birds like this salt-marsh-dwelling Savannah Sparrow as part of her broader project on avian adaptations to extreme and challenging environments.
This week Jake Berv presented his work on the avian mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary to the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. Jake’s recent work has focused on how genomes evolve in response to mass extinctions that select for life history traits. This was our lab’s first-ever…
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:
Cornell article on our Patagonia field course: http://spring2016.periodicals.cals.cornell.edu/students/new-ecology-course-takes-students-patagonia
Art, Science, and Writing in and about the Galapagos: we just returned from the field component of our three-class curriculum for freshmen that uses the Galapagos Islands as a linked framework for training in writing, evolutionary biology, and artistic expression. My thanks to the course leaders — Liz, Nick, Scott,…
Congratulations to course organizers/leaders Ben Freeman and Alexa Class Freeman, and to the student co-authors, for the first of several scientific papers arising out of their Spring 2015 Advanced Tropical Ornithology course. Back at the curriculum review stage there was some healthy push-back when peer-reviewed student publications were suggested as…
Video highlights from our January 2016 field course in Patagonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9jGu7ErMsE
Leo Campagna and I are finishing up our trip to Patagonia, where we are setting up logistics for our forthcoming field course and generally having a great time with both wildlife and Leo’s friends and family here in his home town of Puerto Madryn. Right whales, elephant seals, guanacos, grisson,…
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar: Scott was in Washington DC this Friday to give a seminar as part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar Series. His seminar, titled “Chickadees and climate change: Ecological and evolutionary insights from common backyard birds” highlighted some of the work he has been doing…
Our crew at AOU: Scott, David, Leo, and Nick:
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…