Congratulations to Andy Johnson for persevering through the publication processs to see his undergrad thesis work out in a peer-reviewed journal. Andy spent two arduous summers in the high arctic putting migration tracking devices on Whimbrels–a first summer to deploy them, a second summer to get them back, and a…
Lab of Ornithology postdoc (and first author) Rusty Ligon and grad student Nick Mason are part of a team that just published a neat paper on the evolution of plumage coloration among finches: Ligon, R. A., Simpson, R. K., Mason, N. A., Hill, G. E., & McGraw, K. J. (2016).…
Postdoc Jen Walsh just returned from a very successful trip to southern California, where she was sampling birds like this salt-marsh-dwelling Savannah Sparrow as part of her broader project on avian adaptations to extreme and challenging environments.
I’m tardy to post here that postdoc Dave Toews recently published an ornithologically quite noteworthy paper in the Auk: Ornithological Advances from his PhD work at the University of British Columbia with Darren Irwin. Their study found evidence of strongly heterogeneous genomic divergence between a number of groups in the…
Here’s a shot of David and Canadian Minister of Science Dr. Kirsty Duncan at a reception in Ottawa this week in honor of the current cohort of Banting Postdoctoral Scholars:
This week Jake Berv presented his work on the avian mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary to the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. Jake’s recent work has focused on how genomes evolve in response to mass extinctions that select for life history traits. This was our lab’s first-ever…
Nick on AOS professional society trends and challenges: Graduate student Nick Mason is the lead author on a paper out today that reports on a wide spectrum of trends and challenges related to membership in the American Ornithological Society. This survey was a major undertaking, the analyses are robust, and…
So far, so good … everyone in our group of freshman advisees seems to be transitioning well to Cornell after these first weeks of Fall classes, in part owing to the wise mentoring by my student advising partner Alyssa Rodriguez (thanks, Alyssa!). And way to go, freshmen! Shown here: (top…
We are enjoying a hard-working visit by Argentinians Dr. Cecilia Kopuchian and Dr. Darío Lijtmaer, who along with Leo Campagna from our lab are in the midst of prepping LOTS of samples for ddRAD sequencing as part of a project investigating the potential role of rivers as barriers to gene…
Probably only at Cornell would you find a regular weekly audience of so many undergrads, grad students, postdocs, and others (71 people total, at yesterday’s first meeting) for a weekly research seminar on bird-related topics! The most recent version of this semester’s full schedule is included below: Ornithology…
Grad student Natalie Hofmeister and former lab member Dustin Rubenstein just published a new paper in Ecology Letters on adaptation to environmental variability in African starlings. Natalie and Dustin show that variability in the environment of African starlings influences patterns of substitution in the glucocorticoid receptor, which allows organisms to…
Happy SNEEB to all: Our lab group joined with the Lab of Ornithology postdocs more generally to host the inaugural Fall semester SNEEB (the Friday social hour for departments with the prior names of Systematics and Ecology, Entomology, and Neurobiology and Behavior…) last evening. Took a little more pre-planning than…
Congratulations to our Ben Van Doren for being awarded the WOS prize for best undergraduate research presentation at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! And likewise congratulations to grad student Sahas Barve for winning one of the main grad student presentation awards, Teresa Pegan for placing highly in…
Wonderful to see so many colleagues old and new! It was fantastic to see so many alumni — former Cornell students, past lab group members, former visiting scientists, field course students, academic advisees … all of you! — at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! You can read…
Jake brings home the NAOC talks: Grad student Jake Berv was the closer in our long series of presentations at the NAOC meeting that ended yesterday. Talking in the very last session of the conference, Jake presented on his deep-time comparisons of diversification patterns in the avian Tree-of-Life, and on…
Petra Deane-Coe on Swamp Sparrow adaptation: PhD student Petra Deane-Coe gave a clear and animated talk on her innovative explorations of adaptive divergence in swamp sparrows that reside in different marsh habitats. Part of Petra’s presentation involved an in-depth comparison of differentiation as measured through complementary metrics for comparing genome-wide…
Shawn Billerman on sapsuckers at NAOC: Just a few weeks before his dissertation defense at the University of Wyoming, Shawn gave an exciting update on his PhD study of sapsucker hybridization, which he has studied in the field, with genomics, and via niche modelling. Shawn did this work with his…
Nick Mason is everywhere at the NAOC! As in past years, it seems like PhD student Nick Mason was everywhere at the North American Ornithological Conference; in fact I’m quite sure that no other student at the 2000+ meeting had this same degree of multifaceted contribution. Nick was accordingly awarded…
Scott Taylor on chickadee hybridization and fitness: Dr. Scott Taylor, a former postdoc in our lab (since he is now four days into his new job as a professor at U Colorado!) gave a detailed symposium talk here at the NAOC on the breakdown of metabolic pathways (and the underlying…
Warmest of best wishes to lab alumna Vale Ferretti (who got her PhD in our lab a few years back) and her husband Ariel on the birth of their son Faustino! His birthday was August 13th and he came into the world at 2.494 kg (you can tell by the…