Eamon Corbett
Postdoctoral Fellow
My research centers on the evolutionary origins of bird species and their characteristic traits: especially color. I use whole genome sequencing, field sampling, museum specimen collections, digital media archives, and machine learning phenotyping to understand avian coloration, speciation, and biogeography.
I am particularly interested in bird eye color variation and its ecological and genetic drivers. Bird eyes display a striking rainbow of colors, but we know very little about how and why that diversity came to be!
As part of my Rose Postdoctoral research, I am developing a machine learning pipeline that will automatically extract eye color metrics from the Macaulay Library’s vast photo archive to build a dataset of eye colors for almost all bird species on earth. This will be invaluable in uncovering global ecological and geographic patterns of variation.
The genes responsible for differences in eye pigmentation are also largely unknown. For my Ph.D. research at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, I collected specimens and sequenced whole genomes to identify loci associated with intraspecific variation in eye color in Boat-tailed Grackles in the Southeast. At Cornell, I am expanding that work across the entire Icteridae family (New World blackbirds), to examine what molecular pathways are responsible for convergent evolution of pale eyes in different lineages of Icterids.
Education
Ph.D., Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University
A.B., Integrative Biology, Harvard University
