Graduate student Jake Berv is a co-author on a paper just out in The Auk that argues for full species status for the population of the Bahama Woodstar (a hummingbird) from the Inagua islands in the Bahamas: Divergence in morphology, calls, song, mechanical sounds, and genetics supports species status for…
This all-species phylogeny for the nine-primaried oscine passerines (a clade of about 800 species of warblers, orioles, blackbirds, tanagers, cardinals, sparrows, and related birds) is the result of a long collaboration between our lab and colleagues at three other institutions.
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.…
I (Irby) just returned from leading a trip to Galapagos for 12 Lab of Ornithology members, including our recently retired lab manager Laura Stenzler. My video highlight reel from this trip is at http://youtu.be/7iSRASwRbaQ. Most special natural history moments this time around included swimming with orcas at VERY close range,…
Congratulations to postdoc Leo Campagna, who has just been selected as a Genomics Scholar by the Cornell Vertebrate Genomics program. This award recognizes Leo’s leadership and exciting research program, and provides substantial financial underwriting for Leo and his projects. Way to go, Leo!!!
Congratulations to Ben and his co-authors for their paper which just came out in the Auk. This is Ben’s first paper, and it results in part from his independent research as a high school student, before he even arrived at Cornell! Link to paper: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1642/AUK-13-260.1
Special thanks to postdocs Leo Campagna (based in our lab), Ana Dalziel and Nancy Chen (part of our lab group), and Brett Pasch and Ali Johnston (from other Lab of Ornithology programs) for doing a spectacular job of showcasing our postdoctoral program at the Lab board meeting on Friday, and…
Taylor, S. A., Curry, R. L., White, T. A., Ferretti, V. and Lovette, I. (2014), Spatiotemporally consistent genomic signatures of reproductive isolation in a moving hybrid zone. Evolution, 68: 3066–3081. Abstract: Studies of hybrid zone dynamics often investigate a single sampling period and draw conclusions from that temporal snapshot. Stochasticity can,…
David’s commentary in The Auk provides a nicely balanced perspective on the opportunities and challenges of using different criteria to define avian species. Clicking on this post will open this announcement in a window where you can download David’s full commentary: Toews 2014 species commentary
A warm welcome to Fausto, who is the in-country leader and organizer of all of our Galapagos courses for Cornell students and trips for Lab of Ornithology members — and who is also an exceptional Galapagos naturalist in general. This is Fausto’s first visit to Cornell, though he already has…
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.
Thanks to Nick for helping coordinate the Center for Teaching Excellence UWide Teaching Conference, in which he also led a workshop on Experiential Learning that featured our field courses in Kenya & the Galapagos.
This has been a very, very good day for three of our lab alumni: PhD alumnus Dan Rabosky, now an assistant professor at Michigan, has been named one of this year’s 18 Packard Fellows, a truly significant (and well deserved) honor! More information here. Undergrad alumni Mike Harvey and Glenn…
A warm welcome to Dr. Cecilia Kopuchian and Dr. G. Sebastian Cabanne, who are both visiting the lab from their home institutions in Argentina. Here they will be learning to use new genomic approaches for investigating their research questions about differentiation and conservation genetics. Cecilia comes to us from the…
You can read more about Jake’s study of continga relationships here: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b35ddb671faf4a16c0ce32406&id=e46626901d&e=0011c99ba8
Curatorial/Research Associate — Ornithology and Mammalogy Collections — Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology — Cornell University The Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates (CUMV) is seeking an ornithologist or mammalogist to curate and grow the collections through an organized program of accession involving Cornell students in all aspects of museum-based…
And one on a spectacular avian radiation too: Berv, J. S., and R. O. Prum. 2014. A comprehensive multilocus phylogeny of the Neotropical cotingas (Cotingidae, Aves) with a comparative evolutionary analysis of breeding system and plumage dimorphism and a revised phylogenetic classification. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.
A warm welcome to new postdoc Dr. David Toews, who comes to the Lab as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow. David did his PhD on the hybridization genetics of Yellow-rumped Warblers at the University of British Columbia, where he was supervised by Darren Irwin.
Congratulations to Stepfanie Aguillon and Nick Mason for winning student presentation awards at the end of the AOU/COS meeting! Likewise congratulations to our former undergraduates Shawn Billerman and Ben Winger for this recognition.
I admit in advance that I’m biased, but I think that today’s symposium organized by our postdocs Scott Taylor and Leo Campagna included many of the best talks in all of the AOU/COS meeting. Scott led off the day with an overview of open questions in speciation research that can…