Jen and the Duct Tape Duck
Not related to research but too good not to post here: Postdoc Jen Walsh using duct tape to keep a bandage on the foot of her pet duck:
Stepfanie spotlighted on EEB graduate student association page
PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon is this month’s featured scientist on our graduate student association home page — http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/grads/ — which is worth checking out both to read about Stepfanie and because the site as a whole is indicative of the strength of our graduate program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
Our entire crew at the Evolution 2017 meeting in Portland
The current members of our lab group who are at the Evolution meeting in Portland this week: Leo Campagna, Nick Mason, Gavin Leighton, David Toews, Petra Deane-Coe, Shawn Billerman, Jen Walsh, Stepfanie Aguillon, and Eliot Miller. Add in a few talks by researchers from other countries who visited our lab…
Stepfanie Aguillon at Evolution 2017
Graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon presented a poster at the Evolution conference on her genomic investigations into the hybrid zone of yellow-shafted x red-shafted flickers. Contrary to all previous forays on this topic, Stepfanie is finding markers that differentiate these forms and that may be associated with their color differences and…
Jen Walsh at Evolution 2017
Postdoc Jen Walsh just presented at the Evolution conference in Portland on her ongoing studies of adaptation and gene flow among Saltmarsh and Nelson’s Sparrows.
David Toews at Evolution, Part 2
Postdoc Dave Toews gave a second talk today at the Evolution conferenece, in which he discussed cases of mitochondrial and nuclear discordance in warblers: In yellow-rumped warblers where mitochondrial DNA has introgressed between two forms, and in golden and blue-winged warblers, where mitochondrial DNA is distinct in the face of…
Petra Deane-Coe at Evolution 2017
Graduate student Petra Deane-Coe presented a talk at the Evolution conference today in Portland. Petra covered her studies of local adaptation in Swamp Sparrows and her careful exploration of its underlying genetic basis, based on comparisons among whole-genome datasets from sparrows that are adapted to saline marshes versus others that…
Leo Campagna at Evolution 2017
Leo Campagna gave a talk today on the genomic architecture of phenotypic differences in capuchino seedeaters. The study (recently published in Science Advances) shows that there are very small genetic differences among these species and that they tend to center around regions that are likely to control the expression of…
Nick Mason at Evolution 2017
Grad student Nick Mason is presenting his work today at the Evolution conference in Portland. This component of Nick’s dissertation looks at the surprisingly complex history of a group of seedeaters, and was done in collaboration with several colleagues from Mexico.
Shawn Billerman at Evolution 2017
Postdoc Shawn Billerman is presenting his work at the Evolution conference in Portland. This component of Shawn’s study compares the climate niches of several Great Plains hybrid zones and tracks how they have changed over the past 60 years.
Catalina Palacios at Evolution 2017
Catalina Palacios, a PhD student from Daniel Cadena’s lab group in Colombia, is finishing her six-month research visit by talking about the genomic results from her study of two hummingbird species. Catalina’s work shows how whole genome sequencing can help distinguish hummingbird species that resisted delimitation with other techniques (mtdna…
David Toews at Evolution, part 1
Postdoc David Toews gave a 5-minute blitz talk today at the Evolution conference on the topic of “How hybridization structures the genomes of related birds”.
Sebastián Cabanne at Evolution
Sebastián Cabanne gave a talk today at the Evolution meetings in Portland on the historical phylogeography of the atlantic forest and andean forest biomes. He used data generated in part in our lab during two visits (2014 and 2016) to study patterns of isolation and connectivity in two co-distributed passerines.…
Irby wins Cornell’s top award for advising students
Irby Lovette was honored with Cornell’s Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award during this past graduation weekend. The awards, which are given each year to four faculty from across the campus and which are Cornell’s highest recognition for advising, underscore of the importance of engagement with undergraduates and are based…
Stepfanie on Research and Teaching
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and her collaborators presented a poster this week at the national Teaching as Research Conference. Their study used undergraduates on our Introductory Evolutionary Biology course to explore gender-based differences in student participation. Among the main take-aways: male and female students interact differently in the classroom, with…
Solved: fishy mystery from the Congo basin
Lab associate John Sullivan and undergraduate Madi Rich, along with colleagues, published a paper this month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society that describes a ‘lost’ species of electric fish from the Ogooué River of Gabon. A nice write-up on this project is on the Cornell Chronicle site…
Congratulations to all 2017 graduates!
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!!!!
Dr. Petra is hooded
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!
Our Spring Semester 2017 classes are over…
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…
Songs, speciation, and sparrows
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…