Research

To understand how organisms evolve, we need to understand the genomic mechanisms that produce the traits upon which selection acts. As part of my dissertation research, I used variation in eye color of Boat-tailed Grackles to, for the first time, identify genomic regions associated with iris pigmentation in a wild bird species.

I am currently expanding this work by sequencing whole genomes across the Icteridae (New World Blackbirds), a family with numerous independent shifts in eye color. I aim to identify loci whose evolutionary histories mirror the patterns of phenotypic variation across the clade.

Bird iris color is a striking and diverse adaptive trait involved in both survival and signaling, but has been relatively overlooked compared to other facets of animal coloration.

I published a review paper in Ibis summarizing what is and isn't known about the pigments, genes, and ecological pressures driving eye color variation in birds. For my postdoc, I am further examining the ecological and genomic correlates of eye coloration across birds.

Participatory science platforms, such as eBird and iNaturalist, have generated vast digital media collections that are underutilized in biodiversity research because of a shortage of methods to extract quantitative data. In my current position at Cornell, I am developing a machine-learning pipeline to measure eye color from user-submitted photos in the Macaulay Library database.

I am also implementing a novel approach to measure bird eye sizes from photos by leveraging the AVONET dataset of bill measurements, taken from specimens of thousands of species. That effort is part of a collaboration on ecological correlates of dawn song in the Western Ghats of India.

With the LSU Museum of Natural Science, I have participated in ornithological collecting expeditions to Peru (twice), Colombia, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. In addition to contributing to genomic studies, these expeditions expanded our basic knowledge about the distributions of birds, documenting numerous range extensions and hybrid zones (such as the Pheugopedius wrens across the Ucayali River, at left). I co-authored a paper on the avifauna of the Central Peruvian Amazon, and am working on two manuscripts about the birds of the Cordillera Azul, Peru.