Postdocs Shawn Billerman and Jen Walsh were invited to present their research at a NSF sponsored collections-science symposium at Harvard this past week. Shawn presented on climate niches of Great Plains hybrids and Jen presented on using sampling replication to understand selective versus demographic process in shaping genomic patterns.
Postdoc Dave Toews has a new paper out in Proceeding B on using admixture mapping in the myrtle – Audubon’s hybrid zone to identify genomic regions associated with distinct plumage characters. Dave and his co-authors identified several genomic regions associated with feather patches that differ between the warblers based on…
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;…
Just-arrived postdoc Daniel Hooper has a paper from his dissertation newly out in Nature Ecology and Evolution entitled Chromosomal inversion differences correlate with range overlap in passerine birds. Abstract is copied below, but his ‘behind the paper’ article in the same issue is also very much worth a read. Abstract:…
A very warm welcome to the newest member of our lab group, Dr. Daniel Hooper, who arrived today as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow. Daniel (at far right in the photo) did his PhD work at the University of Chicago under the advising of Trevor Price; among other topics, Daniel has…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s paper is featured on the cover of the current issue of PLOS Genetics. Here is what that journal has to say about her contribution: Florida Scrub-Jays reveal new details about isolation-by-distance. The pattern of isolation-by-distance is observed often in nature, but we rarely have means to…
PhD student Jake Berv is in Puetro Iguazú, Argentina, at the Ornithological Congress of the Americas this week, presenting his work on the population genomics of the white crowned manakin. Jake’s work on this taxon takes advantage of new techniques being optimized in the Fuller lab to understand diversification in…
Leo Campagna organizes a full day symposium to showcase the latest genomic advances in Neotropical taxa. The symposium featured 14 talks given by people from five different countries on phylogenomics, deep scale phylogenetics and phenotype/genotype associations. The list of presentations included Jake Berv and Leo Campagna (x2) from our lab,…
Warmest of congratulations to grad student Nick Mason for ending his final AOS conference as a student on a high note by winning an AOS Council Presentation Award for his very well-received talk on “Song Evolution, Vocal Learning, and Speciation in Passerine Birds.” Way to go, Nick!
The Cornell undergraduate contingent continued a tradition of performing impressively at this year’s AOS conference. Among the highlights was the crushing victory of the 2/3 Cornell undergraduate team (plus one undergrad from that four-letter-word-staring-with-Y Ivy…guess they know a bit about birds over in New Haven) in the venerable quiz bowl…
A host of people affiliated with our group were voted in as Elected Members of the American Ornithology Society this year. Warmest of congratulations (!!!) to our current Lab of Ornithology colleagues Nick Mason, Emma Greig, Leo Campagna, and Karan Odom, and similarly to Chris Balakrishnan, Karl Berg, Sarah Kaiser,…
Postdoc David Toews gave one of the very last talks at the American Ornithological Society conference today, in which he explored how the costs of migration might limit the western breeding ranges of warblers that next in the boreal zone of Canada and Alaska.
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s newest paper is now out in the journal PLOS Genetics — where it was released just 1.5 hours before she gave a talk on it at the AOS conference at Michigan State. The paper titled “Deconstructing isolation-by-distance: The genomic consequences of limited dispersal” shows how the…
Stepfanie Aguillon presented yesterday at AOS on a “side” (but major) research project on limited dispersal and isolation-by-distance in Florida Scrub-Jays. Stepfanie started this as a rotation project when she first arrived at Cornell in collaboration with Nancy Chen. The paper is available today on PLOS Genetics (http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006911). This study…
Research Associate Leo Campagna presented today at AOS on his ongoing exploration of the genes that control plumage — and speciation — in the capuccino seadeater finches. Among the take-home messages of his talk was the finding that although these species have some commonalities in the genes that control their…
Postdoc Jen Walsh talked on the first morning of the AOS conference about her ongoing work on the hybridization genomics of Nelson’s and Saltmarsh Sparrows. Among Jen’s findings is strong evidence for the transfer of adaptive genes from Saltmarsh Sparrows (which have a long evolutionary history of adaptation to the…
Postdoc Shawn Billerman led off by talking about his studies of avian suture zones (locations where multiply hybrid zones overlap in space) on the first morning of the American Ornithological Society Conference. Shawn used models of past and present climate to show that different bird species respond in different ways…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon sent along this link to where her poster is featured on a site about scientific poster design and communication. I’m flagging it here both because the expert at the site found only a few things to tweak on Stepfanie’s work, and because the site itself is…
A paper resulting from Benjamin Van Dooren’s undergraduate honors thesis is out in the latest issue of Molecular Ecology where is is accompanied by a great commentary by Reto Buri. Ben did this honors project in our lab and went on to receive a Marshall Scholarship for his PhD at…
Be sure to catch this presentation if you are going to be at AOS in East Lansing next week! 😉