2011
The Cooper Ornithological Society is pleased to recognize the recipients of the Young Professional Award, now in its third year, Drs. Matthew Carling and Karl Berg. First awarded in 2009, the Young Professional Award recognizes early-career ornithological researchers for their outstanding contributions to ornithology. Two awardees are selected from applicants to deliver talks at the Young Professional Plenary session held at each annual meeting and are given 25 minutes each (20 minutes for presentation, 5 minutes for questions) to present their research to the entire conference body. The two awardees each receive a cash prize, a travel award, and are invited to a breakfast attended by the COS president, officers, and student presentation committee members on the day prior to the plenary session. Candidates (primarily PhD students near completion and postdoctoral fellows) must be COS members and must be in the final phase of graduate studies (last 9 months) or have graduated within three years of the previous annual meeting. More information is available at www.cooper.org/awards_and_grants/awards_and_grants.htm#students.
Matt Carling’s research
interests focus on trying to understand the mechanisms that
result in the formation of new species of birds. Utilizing a
variety of population genetic and phylogenetic tools, Matt’s
work explores the evolutionary forces responsible for
generating and maintaining biodiversity. As a graduate
student at Louisiana State University, where he worked with
Dr. Robb Brumfield at the LSU Museum of Natural Science,
Matt began focusing his attention on the naturally occurring
hybrid zone between Indigo (Passerina cyanea) and Lazuli
(Passerina amoena) buntings. After collecting large amounts
of DNA sequence data from birds collected from across the
hybrid zone, Matt discovered startling differences in the
levels of between-species introgression among different
genetic loci. This work was the first to demonstrate clearly
the extent to which alleles of loci located in different
regions of the genome can move between species of birds and
identified a region of the z-chromosome that may play a
particularly important role in maintaining reproductive
isolation between Indigo and Lazuli buntings. As the Fuller
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
working with Dr. Irby Lovette, Matt continued his work on
the bunting hybrid zone, exploring both the evolutionary
forces shaping the early stages of divergence between the
species and how the genetic structure of the hybrid zone has
changed over the past 50 years. This research is continuing
at the University of Wyoming, where he is currently an
Assistant Professor. Matt received his bachelor’s degree in
Biology from the University of Michigan and a master’s
degree in Zoology from the University of Idaho. Matt is
especially grateful to the Cooper Ornithological Society for
the opportunity to share his research with the
ornithological community and hopes that the society will
continue to showcase the incredible talents of early-career
ornithologists.
Karl
Berg’s interests in tropical birds stem from a decade in
Ecuador that began with a study of seed dispersal in
toucans. Food plant collections revealed an undescribed
endemic genus of tree, now called the Ecuadorian tree
(Ecuadendron). He then spent several years creating
the first bird species lists for seven protected areas in
Ecuador. To document avian diversity, he created a
collection of audio recordings as voucher specimens for a
large number of species. One of the most endangered
birds in Ecuador is the Great Green Macaw. Karl spent a year
studying their movements in relation to food production,
weekly monitored 100 trees, and provided some of the first
evidence that larger trees produce more food – a central,
but until then unsubstantiated, tenet of forest
restoration. He returned to the USA and earned a M.Sc.
under Victor Apanius, at Florida International University.
His thesis was the first to identify the variables that
trigger the onset to the dawn chorus in a tropical
forest. Despite being a widely recognized
example of community behavior in birds, the dynamics of dawn
choruses remained poorly-understood. Karl found that
birds that forage higher in the forest and have larger eyes
began to sing earlier than those lower in the forest with
smaller eyes. However, not all birds followed this
pattern. Parrots were a persistent exception. To
find out why parrots followed their own agenda, Karl visited
the best known parrot population – a long-term study of
Green-rumped Parrotlets, led by Steve Beissinger, in the
Llanos of Venezuela. Here were hundreds of parrots
with permanent color bands, breeding histories and complex
vocal dialogues a few feet off the ground. It became
apparent that this was the ideal population in which to
learn about parrot vocal communication. He then
applied to the Ph.D. program at Cornell, where faculty
member Jack Bradbury was overseeing studies of communication
in wild parrots in seven countries and three
continents. This turned out to have been an excellent
choice and Karl is now completing his Ph.D. thesis on vocal
communication in parrotlets. He expresses a heart-felt
thanks to the Cooper Ornithological Society for allowing him
to share one of the chapters from his dissertation.2010
The Cooper Ornithological Society is pleased to recognize the recipient of the 2010 Young Professional Award, Zachary Cheviron, and finalists Andrea Townsend and Daniel Barton. Established in 2008, the Young Professional Award recognizes early-career ornithological researchers for their outstanding contributions to ornithology. Three finalists are selected from applicants to deliver talks at the Young Professional Plenary session held at each annual meeting and are given 25 minutes each (20 minutes for presentation, 5 minutes for questions) to present their research to the entire conference body. The three finalists are guaranteed travel awards and are invited to a breakfast attended by the COS president, officers, and student presentation committee members on the day prior to the plenary session. The recipient of the award receives a cash prize. Candidates (primarily PhD students near completion and postdoctoral fellows) must be COS members and must be in their final year of graduate studies or have graduated within one year of the previous annual meeting. More information is available at www.cooper.org/awards_and_grants/awards_and_grants.htm#students.
Zac Cheviron’s
research interests lie in understanding the processes and
mechanisms that contribute to local adaptation in natural
populations of birds. Perhaps due to a prolonged lack of
topographic relief during his childhood in central
Illinois, he developed an early fascination with montane
environments, and as a PhD student working under the
guidance of Dr. Robb Brumfield at Louisiana State
University, Zac focused his research on exploring the
process of local adaptation along altitudinal gradients.
His dissertation combined population genetic studies with
genomic analyses of gene expression profiles to examine
the genetic processes that underlie physiological
adaptation to different elevational zones in
Rufous-collared Sparrows (Zonotrichia capensis). This work
was among the first to examine the importance of gene
expression differences in evolutionary adaptation to high
altitude in birds, and it demonstrated substantial
plasticity in the expression of genes that contribute to
cold and hypoxic stress compensation. Zac’s work in high
altitude adaptation is being continued at the University
of Nebraska, where he is currently a postdoctoral research
fellow working with Dr. Jay Storz. His most recent work
combines genomic analyses of gene expression with
functional biochemical assays and protein modeling to test
for adaptive divergence in genes involved in oxygen
transport and aerobic metabolism in Z. capensis as well as
several other birds and mammals that occur in different
altitudinal and thermal environments. Zac also holds a
master’s degree from Illinois State University and a
bachelor’s degree from the University of Evansville. He
wishes to thank the Cooper Ornithological Society for the
opportunity to present his work, and to encourage the
society to continue to support this award as a venue to
highlight the work of early-career ornithologists.
Andrea Townsend is
interested in the factors that drive individual variation
in animal behavior. She enjoys exploring behavioral
strategies on multiple levels: from the level of their
social contexts, to their genetic and physiological
underpinnings, to their ultimate fitness consequences. She
is particularly interested in the behavioral responses of
birds to rapid human-induced environmental changes,
including emerging infectious diseases, urbanization and
climate change. As part of her dissertation research at
Cornell University, where she was advised by Dr. Irby
Lovette, Andrea studied the causes and consequences of
inbreeding in the cooperatively breeding American Crow.
She discovered that close inbreeding occurred with
surprising regularity in a suburban crow population, and
that it had high costs, including a suppressed innate
immune response, a higher probability of disease mortality
and lower overall survival probability among inbred crows.
In her recent work, she has been modeling the contexts in
which kin selection benefits of inbreeding outweigh the
costs of inbreeding depression, and exploring evidence for
variation in the occurrence and costs of inbreeding across
urban-rural gradients and during epidemic and non-epidemic
years. As a side project, she has also been carrying out a
multi-species comparative phylogeography and conservation
genetics study of the endemic and endangered birds of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic.In her current postdoctoral work, also at Cornell University, Andrea is exploring the genetic mating strategies (and the occurrence of inbreeding) across long-term study populations of the cooperatively breeding, Threatened Florida Scrub-Jay. In July 2010, Andrea will begin an NSF Bioinformatics Fellowship, with co-sponsors at the Smithsonian Institution and Cornell University, during which she will use the long-term Black-throated Blue Warbler database from Hubbard Brook to seek evidence for behavioral drivers of population dynamics under different climate scenarios. Andrea would like to thank the Cooper Ornithological Society for the opportunity to share the results of her research at the Young Professionals Award plenary. She encourages other young scientists to pursue this exciting opportunity present their work in a plenary setting, to meet the board of the COS, and to interact with the other “Young Professionals,” past and present.
Dan Barton is a
native of inner-city Chicago, and fortunately discovered
his love of birds and field biology while studying for his
B.S. at the Evergreen State College. Dan interned with
Point Reyes Bird Observatory while an undergraduate and
continued on as a staff biologist there following his
graduation in 2001. While at PRBO, he worked principally
on the breeding biology of shrubsteppe songbirds in
eastern Oregon and northeastern California, but also spent
time developing 21st century technologies for managing
PRBO’s information resources. He also studied songbirds
and seabirds in coastal California, the Aleutian Islands,
the Leeward Hawaiian Islands, and Isla Guadalupe, Mexico.
Since 2005, his main task has been a Ph.D. in organismal
biology and ecology at the University of Montana under the
guidance of Dr. Tom Martin, which he will be defending in
2010. His dissertation research focused on testing
alternative ecological explanations for life history
variation among bird species, including resource
limitation and extrinsic mortality hypotheses. Dan used
the response of parental provisioning rate to natural
variation in brood size and brood size manipulations
across a diversity of bird species on three continents to
discriminate among these alternatives. He found that adult
mortality rates play an over-arching role in explaining
variation among species in the way provisioning rate
responds to brood size variation. Dan is grateful to the
many collaborators and field assistants involved in his
dissertation research. He enjoyed teaching advanced
ornithology to dozens of Evergreen State College students
as a teaching assistant for Dr. Steve Herman over a six
year span, and recently instructed population biology and
evolution at the graduate level at Montana. Dan is
also currently the chair of the Cooper Student Board, and
hopes that new opportunities like the Young Professional
Award help encourage young scientists to get involved in
securing the future of our ornithological societies.2009
The Cooper Ornithological Society is pleased to recognize the first recipient of the new Young Professional Student Presentation Award, Jamie Cornelius, and finalists Karie Decker and Eben Paxton. Established in 2008, the Young Professional Student Presentation Award recognizes early-career ornithological researchers for their outstanding contributions to ornithology. Three finalists are selected from applicants to deliver talks at the Young Professional Plenary session held at each annual meeting and are given 25 minutes each (20 minutes for presentation, 5 minutes for questions) to present their research to the entire conference body. The three finalists are guaranteed travel awards and are invited to a breakfast attended by the COS president, officers, and student presentation committee members on the day prior to the plenary session. The recipient of the award receives a cash prize. Candidates (M.Sc, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellows) must be COS members and must be in their final year of graduate studies or have graduated within one year of the previous annual meeting. More information is available here.
Jamie Cornelius grew up among
the forests and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, where her
parents’ environmental activism inspired an early (and
sustained) interest in biology. She graduated cum laude in
2001 with a B.S. from the University of Washington and
recently completed a Ph.D. in animal behavior at
University of California, Davis. Under the guidance of Dr.
Tom Hahn, she investigated the behavior and physiology of
an opportunistic, nomadic finch. Previous studies of
migratory behavior and physiology have focused almost
exclusively on seasonal migrants. Jamie’s work on the
nomadic Red Crossbill (Loxia curvirostra)
examined relationships between environmental cues, stress
physiology, and behavioral response to nonseasonal
environmental changes. Her work revealed a previously
undescribed effect of social information on the endocrine
response to food deprivation and exposed potentially
important relationships among stress physiology, annual
scheduling, and seasonality of resources (e.g., molt
duration and stress suppression in seasonal versus
flexible migration). Jamie has accepted a post-doctoral
position at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology where
she will work with Dr. Martin Wikelski to further
investigate the behavioral and physiological flexibility
of opportunistic nomads. In her first project, she will
measure the metabolic costs of free-living, breeding Red
Crossbills under winter and summer environmental
conditions and relate those costs to reproductive effort,
foraging effort, and fledging success. She thanks the
Cooper Society for the opportunity to present her doctoral
work and encourages other students to participate in the
Young Professionals Award competition, which offers a
low-pressure opportunity to meet society members and be
involved in the meeting.
Born and raised in Montana,
Karie Decker has always taken an interest in the natural
world. This interest motivated the completion of her
undergraduate degree in biology from the University of
Montana in 2001. For several years after that, she worked
in a variety of ecosystems throughout the world, including
tropical cloud forests, high-elevation forests, desert and
estuarial riparian habitats, and desert shrub-steppe
uplands. From 2004 to 2007, she studied avian life-history
strategies for Dr. Tom Martin as his field and lab
supervisor at the University of Montana. By assisting and
leading various research projects from northern Arizona to
Venezuela she developed her own personal research
interests, and in 2007 was accepted to the graduate
program at the University of Arizona under the advisement
of Dr. Courtney Conway. Karie’s thesis focuses on why
avian clutch size declines seasonally. Using correlative
and experimental approaches, she is examining several
alternative hypotheses, including nest predation, food
availability, and the female’s age. In addition, she is
examining the independent effects of climate change and
human recreation on avian nesting success in a
high-elevation riparian system that has experienced
drastic changes in spring temperatures and receives over
two million visitors each summer. Upon completion of her
research in July 2009, Karie will start a position as the
coordinator for the Invasive Species Project at the
Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at
the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Eben Paxton’s interests are in
understanding and modeling population dynamics, conservation genetics, and migration ecology. For his recently completed doctoral work at Northern Arizona University, Eben used molecular genetic and morphological markers to identify subspecies of the migratory Willow Flycatcher, linking flycatcher subspecies to sites on their wintering grounds and migratory stopovers and helping to better define the boundary of the endangered subspecies, the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher. Concurrently with his doctoral work, Eben was project manager of a long-term demographic study of the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Biological Science Center. Together, the two projects provide complementary insights into the ecology and conservation of the species. Eben also received a master’s degree from Northern Arizona University and a bachelor’s degree from Evergreen State College. Eben is continuing work with the USGS on riparian bird conservation issues in the Southwest and teaching classes in ecology and modeling at the University of Southern Mississippi.