Warmest of congratulations to all of the 2017 Cornell graduates — we’ve known so many of you, and shared some amazing adventures in the classroom, laboratory, and at far-flung places around the globe. Andrew and Sarah: we love the caps!!!!
Congratulations to Petra (aka Dr. Deane-Coe) for graduating this past weekend with her PhD. It was very fun to see her walk on stage and get outfitted with the red hood that represents this high-level professional accomplishment!
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 provides some perspective in a “News and Views” article in the journal Molecular Ecology on new behavioral research in the white-throated sparrow conducgted by Sara Lipshutz (in Elizabeth Derryberry’s lab at Tulane), which compared bioacoustic variation across a contact zone between two white-throated sparrow subspecies. White-throated sparrows…
Leo’s paper in Science Advances is getting lots of really great press coverage, notably this article and accompanying video by James Gorman in the New York Times, this post for Forbes by the anonymous but well regarded blogger GrrlScientist, and coverage on Spanish and Portuguese media though collaborators in Argentina…
A paper on a project led by Leo Campagna and involving collaborators from the USA, Brazil, and Argentina is out today in Science Advances. This paper shows how a small number of genes that control plumage traits have been under repeated selection (probably via sexual selection) to produce the amazing…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently published a paper in the Journal of Avian Biology on why some warblers might not nest further into the northwest; All About Birds has a write-up on the work here. Dave shows that there is likely suitable habitat for several wood warbler species at high latitudes in…
The Magic School Bus — the science education television show — is getting a reboot, and grad student Jake Berv (maybe the kid with the red hat in the image here???) contributed substantial scientific feedback to the script for one of the forthcoming episodes. Look for Jake’s name in the…
Petra jumped over the final obstacle towards her PhD by passing her oral review with ease — in fact it was a fun discussion about her science and discoveries on her swamp sparrow system through which Petra has discovered the genes involved in this special case of rapid adaptation to…
Irby just returned from a very fun week-long tour of the Galapagos for Lab of Ornithology members that was run by our long-term colleague Fausto Rodriguez of Galapagos Best. Among the special sightings was an aggressive face-off between a large male tortoise and a large male land iguana (testosterone +…