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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ph.D., Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University
A.B., Integrative Biology, Harvard University<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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