New $1.5M Graduate Research Fellowship Honors Former Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

A new $1.5 million gift from philanthropist K. Lisa Yang ’74 has established the Charles Walcott Graduate Research Fellowship in Conservation Bioacoustics to fund graduate research at the Lab of Ornithology in honor of Walcott, professor emeritus and executive director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology during 1981-95. 

The award was announced at an advisory council meeting of the Lab’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. “With the establishment of this fellowship,” said Yang, “I believe we have come full circle in the institutional history of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, honoring Walcott, who is a great teacher and mentor to many graduate students, and a true inspiration.”

Yang’s gift seeks to both honor Walcott as well as provide support to students. “Graduate students and postdocs are the lifeline of science. They are passionate and intense in their curiosity and are truly indispensable to doing the hard work needed in research and discovery. Most importantly, they represent the hope and the future of science,” Yang said. 

“Thanks to the generous gift from K. Lisa Yang, we will be able to support national and international graduate students to continue state-of-the-art bioacoustics research,” said Holger Klinck, the John W. Fitzpatrick Director of the Yang Center.

Walcott completed his PhD in 1959 at Cornell, where he discovered that common house spiders can sense vibrations in their webs through sound. Walcott then went on to Harvard, where he studied how homing pigeons find their way home when released in unfamiliar locations. After Harvard, Walcott served on the faculties at Tufts and Stony Brook University before coming to the Lab of Ornithology.

Walcott became the director of the lab in 1981, heralding the dawn of the modern Lab of Ornithology. Walcott transformed the lab into a robust research center for ornithology and bioacoustics. 

Russ Charif, a bioacoustics researcher and former student of Walcott’s said, “It was Charlie’s vision that led to the founding of the bioacoustics research program now known as the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.” 

Walcott hired Christopher Clark to establish and direct the Bioacoustics Research Program in 1987. Since then, the center has become an international leader in bioacoustics research, technology development, and conservation. 

The center’s engineers invented and built recorders that could capture sounds of wildlife at an ever-growing scale and software that could detect and identify species from the many terabytes of data their recorders captured. Yang Center researchers are pioneering the use of these tools to monitor aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and the health of ecosystems globally.

Over the years, their work has expanded to encompass birds, marine and terrestrial mammals, fish, frogs, and insects, in collaboration with scientists and communities around the world. The Yang Center publishes 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers on average per year and currently supports 7 graduate students and 10 postdoctoral fellows. 

In addition to bringing research and administrative experience to the lab, Walcott brought his passion for making science accessible to everyone—now a core value of the Lab of Ornithology. Before coming to the Lab, Walcott worked on numerous television series, including Exploring Nature, NOVA, and 3-2-1 Contact. Walcott continues to create short films, which he posts to YouTube in retirement. 

The new fellowship will give graduate students an opportunity to experience what Walcott brought to the lab, “a delight in the process of science and a drive to do good work that sprung from curiosity and the sheer fun of it,” said Charif.