Natalie Hoffmeister on starling evo-ecology: PhD student Natalie Hoffmeister gave a professional and polished talk today at the NAOC on how endocrine receptors vary genetically in response to selection resulting from environmental variation. Hard stuff to describe to a general audience of ornithologists who aren’t specialists in either of these areas, but Natalie connected all the dots very clearly. This comparative study was work she did for her MS at Columbia in collaboration with her advisor Dustin Rubenstein, an alumnus from the earliest years of our Cornell lab group.