News

I’m so excited to share that the flicker hybrid zone movement paper has found a home at Evolution! And the early view is live! You can find the manuscript here: Revisiting a classic hybrid zone: movement of the northern flicker hybrid zone in contemporary times.

To make a long story short, the hybrid zone has moved! Let me know what you think!

I’ve had the pleasure to connect with a number of different groups in California through virtual seminars over the past few months! The San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory in November, the Natural History Museum of LA County in December, and Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve this month. So many amazing biologists and folks interested in birds! Thanks for the invites Sirena Lao, Allison Shultz, and Jorge Ramos!

I’m really excited to finally have this manuscript submitted for peer review and available on bioRxiv! We use direct re-sampling of a transect originally conducted in the 1950s to assess movement in the flicker hybrid zone over the past 60 years. We find ~73 km westward shift in the center of the hybrid zone, but no associated changes in width.

Check out the preprint to learn more! And definitely reach out if you have any comments!

bioRxiv link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.456504v1

I’m excited to say that I’ve successfully defended my PhD! And equally excited to say that I’ve accepted a postdoctoral position at Stanford University in the Stanford Science Fellows program! I’m really looking forward to moving back West and spending some time in the California sun! I’ll be pursuing the genetic basis of mate choice in swordtails with Molly Schumer—a switch from my PhD work on flickers, but hopefully it’ll be a fun change!

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I’m very excited to say that this chapter of my dissertation is officially published! I use whole genome sequencing in allopatric and hybrid flickers to identify the regions of the genome that produce their plumage color differences!

You can find the paper here (or message me for a PDF)! All associated scripts are available on my GitHub.

I’m very excited to see a new paper led by the (former) undergraduate, Chloe Mikles, officially out in Molecular Ecology! It was an honor to work with Chloe on her Senior Honors Thesis and I look forward to hearing more about what she accomplishes with these LBBs (little brown birds). You can find the paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.15647

Summers are always the time for academic conferences, but this year was a little different. I’ve participated in two conferences in the last few weeks: the Great Lakes Annual Meeting of Evolutionary Genomics and the North American Ornithological Conference VII. These were supposed to be held in Rochester, NY and San Jose, Puerto Rico, but due to COVID-19 they ended up being virtual. It was definitely interesting getting to connect with colleagues and present my work from the comfort of my own home. I can see both the positive and negative aspects of entirely virtual conferences, so I hope they can continue but don’t totally replace in-person conferences in the future!

I presented on the results from my recent bioRxiv preprint and got lots of useful feedback! I was even awarded an honorable mention for the Student Presentation Awards at NAOC, which is huge given they had 200+ presentations up for awards this year!

I’m excited to share that the biggest chapter of my dissertation—whole genome sequencing in flickers to identify the genetic basis of their color differences—is now available on bioRxiv! It feels great to finally have this paper out in the world!

Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.10.197715

My recent paper (in collaboration with Gregor Siegmund) has been included in a recent issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter in the Chronicle of Higher Education

My new paper (in collaboration with Gregor Siegmund) out in CBE—Life Sciences Education has been covered in the Cornell Chronicle!