Stepfanie on Northern Flicker genomics: at the NAOC conference a day ago, PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon presented on her ongoing field and genomic studies of the great plains hybrid zone between yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers. Even though these two forms are distinct in many plumage traits even beyond their namesake…
Leo on the genomics of a sexually selected avian radiation: Research Associate Leo Campagna led off our lab’s presentations at the North American Ornithological Conference via a talk on his ongoing work on seedeater genomics. The story of this avian radiation just keeps getting better and better as Leo delves…
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…
Jen Walsh on saltmarsh sparrow hybridization: continuing the series of excellent (I’m biased, but they really have all been excellent) talks by our lab group at the NAOC meeting, postdoc Dr. Jen Walsh presented today on her PhD studies of the relative fitness of saltmarsh sparrows, nelson’s sparrows, and their…
“Is he a postdoc or a PhD student?”: Ben Van Doren, who graduated from Cornell just this past May and who is shortly off to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, gave an in-depth presentation at the NAOC on his comparative genomic study of stonechats from populations across Eurasia and Africa.…
Winged warblers: the story is out! David Toews’ presentation on the work he and Scott Taylor have led on the genomics of Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers played to a standing-room-only audience at the North American Ornithological Conference yesterday, and apparently there were many dozens of additional people left outside who…
Stepfanie and Brianna in the field: Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and rising sophomore Brianna Mims spent much of the summer chasing flickers across their hybrid zone in the Great Plains. Here are a few photos of these field researchers and their birds:
Our new Handbook of Bird Biology is here! This week we received the very first advance copies of our new comprehensive textbook of ornithology, just in time to share it with the world at the big NAOC bird conference in August. This means that it will be available from booksellers…
Hybrid Zones Revisited: photo shows Dr. Vanya Rohwer (CUMV Curator of Birds and Mammals) showing postdoc Jen Walsh a series of specimens collected recently by Vanya and Cornell students as part of an ongoing effort to document changes in species distributions and patterns of genetic interchange.
Congrats to grad student Nick Mason, lead author Kelly Zamudio, and former EEB PhD graduate Rayna Bell on their paper in the most recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Zamudio, K. R., Bell, R. C., & Mason, N. A. (2016). Phenotypes in phylogeography: Species’ traits, environmental…
Kudos to grad student Nick Mason, his MS advisor Kevin Burns, and collaborator Phil Unitt for doing the hard work of turning their molecular phylogeny of the entire tanager radiation into a series of formal recommendations on the taxonomic nomenclature of this beautiful but complicated group. This is the kind…
Dr. Sebastián Cabanne is based at the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires. He spent the past month here in our lab generating genomic data to study the connectivity between biomes in the Neotropics. Among other topics, Sebastián is interested in various passerine systems from various areas of South…
Evolution2016: Jake Berv gave a talk entitled “The genomic signature of the lilliput effect across the K/PG mass extinction” at the Evolution conference in Austin.
Evolution2016: Recent graduate Ben Van Doren presented a poster at the Evolution Conference on his studies of comparative genomics in the stonechat complex.
Evolution2016: Postdoc Jen Walsh presented a poster at the 2016 Evolution conference on “Signals of Adaptive Variation in Fresh and Salt Water Populations of Ammodramus Sparrows: Defining Conservation Units Based on Evolutionary Potential” as part of her ongoing research on how these sparrows have adapted (or not) to different environments…
Evolution2016: Grad student Natalie Hofmeister gave a talk on how birds cope with and adapt to environmental variability, titled “Environmental fluctuations influence the evolution of the glucocorticoid receptor in African starlings.” She found that starling lineages that experience greater variance in rainfall show lower rates of substitution in this stress…
Evolution2016: Leo presented on the genomic landscape of differentiation in capuchino seedeaters at the Evolution conference in Austin, TX. The Capuchino’s have shown very little genetic differences in previous studies, but using data from whole genome sequencing we were able to find narrow divergence peaks among species. Many of these…
Postdoc Dave Toews presented the ongoing research in the lab on the genomic consequences of hybridization between golden-winged and blue-winged warblers, which he is working on closely with postdoc Scott Taylor and others. David described how there are only a few genomic regions that differ between these taxa and that…
Congratulations to Leo Campagna on his promotion to the academic title of Research Associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Leo came to the Lab as a postdoc in 2013, and in the years since he has spearheaded an innovative research program on the genomics of speciation in Sporophila seedeaters,…
Ben and Maria are Merrill Presidential Scholars: congratulations to seniors Ben Van Doren and Maria Smith for being honored today as Merrill Presidential Scholars, which means that among other leadership contributions and accomplishments they each rank academically in the top 1% of their soon-to-be graduating class. A super-neat aspect of…