Dr. Sabrina McNew joined our group as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow back in November. Somehow I seemed to have missed posting this arrival as an update here — my apologies, Sabrina! Sabrina comes to us from the University of Utah where she recently defended her PhD under supervisors Sarah Bush and Dale Clayton.
Sabrina says that she enjoyed getting settled into life in Ithaca this fall and meeting lots of new people. She has now spent the first part of the new year in the Galápagos Islands where she is studying avian pox infections in Darwin’s finches. Her field team this year includes long-time assistant Janai Yépez and fantastic new addition Diana Loyola, both from Galápagos, Ecuador. In addition, she has enjoyed collaborating with Kiyoko Gotanda, post-doc at Cambridge University and her team.
Sabrina had a paper accepted to Proceedings of the Royal Society B- “Annual environmental variation influences host tolerance to parasites.” She also presented her work “Carry-over effects of Philornis downsi on Galápagos mockingbirds” at the 4th Symposium on Philornis downsi and Landbird Conservation in the Galápagos, held at the Charles Darwin Research Station on February 7-8th.
She is currently joining a Westminster College field course “Conservation Challenges of Costa Rica” in March as a guest instructor and will return to Ithaca next week.