Warmest of congratulations to Nick for successfully defending his PhD thesis yesterday!
Nick by the numbers (at least some of them): 5.2 years as a PhD student (1 year below the average time-to-completion); 1/1 on postdoc applications with his independent NSF award to work at UC Berkeley starting in January; 23 peer-reviewed papers and counting; 3 teaching awards at Cornell; 3 presentation awards at symposia and conferences; 45 successful grants and fellowships including EPA STAR fellowship, NSF Dissertation Improvement grant, and National Geographic Young Explorer; designed and led at least 5 writing-intensive and/or field classes for undergraduates; 9 undergraduates mentored in research resulting in at least 4 going on to grad school, at least one NSF GRFP fellow, and several publications; 5 years of very active service as Chair of the AOS student affairs committee and on many related AOS committees; 2 peer-reviewed papers on science teaching methods and outcomes; organized and led multiple day-long or multi-day workshops on each of the following topics: professional development, programming in R, and bioinformatics for next-generation sequencing data (the latter including a multi-day workshop at UNAM that Nick gave in Spanish); 2 years of leading Cornell’s EvoGroup symposium; 2 years of lead-organizing Cornell’s EvoDay conference; multiple years as lead SNEEB organizer for EEB; 1 term of service as the student representative on our successful Evolution faculty search committee; 14 proposals submitted as the inaugural chair of the student component of the AOS avian taxonomy committee; 3 collecting trips (including two Nick organized and led) that contributed hundreds of specimens to the CUMV; 1 successful ballot to become an Elected Member of the American Ornithology Society, a recognition never previously granted (as far as I know) to anyone before they received their PhD; and probably a number of other activities and accomplishments that I have forgotten to list here, plus a host of less quantitative but no less meaninful contributions to his peers and colleagues here across the full range of community and scholarly dimensions.