AOS is proud to recognize the students and postdoctoral researchers who are receiving research funding through our 2019 Student and Postdoctoral Research Awards! These annual awards, each up to $2500, honor early-career ornithologists doing research that advances our understanding of birds and their conservation. The research awards committee puts a great deal of time and thought into evaluating applications each year, and we appreciate their efforts!
Donald L. Bleitz Award
Erik Funk, University of Colorado Boulder, “Evolutionary impacts of historical and contemporary changes in habitat on alpine specialists”
Hannah Scharf, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Cognitive Dimensions of Brood Parasitism”
Herbert and Betty Carnes Award
Sarah Jennings, University of California, Davis, “An Investigation of Chemical Profiles in a Cryptic, Monogamous Seabird”
Joseph Grinnell Award
Elisa Henderson, University of California, Riverside, “Do humans drive hybridization? A genomic study of hummingbird species pairs”
Werner and Hildegard Hesse Award
Elizabeth Ames, The Ohio State University, “Carryover effects between wintering habitat, phenology, and post-fledging survival, in a migratory songbird that is non-territorial on the wintering grounds”
Samuel Bressler, UCLA, “Evaluating the effect of gut microbiota on survival and reproductive success in a wild passerine”
Luke Campillo, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, “Population genomics of an endemic Hawaiian lineage: the effect of habitat fragmentation on ‘elepaio (AVES: Chasiempis) demography”
Maria Costantini, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, “Honeycreeper hosts: testing the effect of phylogeny on microbiome community structure using a classic Hawaiian example of adaptive radiation”
Sarah Davis, The University of Texas, “Feather Ontogeny and Pigmentation Patterning in Palaeognathae”
Amelia-Juliette Demery, Cornell University, “Disentangling the polygenic basis of bill color across a finch hybrid zone”
Joely DeSimone, University of Montana, “Investigating the mechanisms regulating departure in facultative migrants”
Eleanor Diamant, University of California, Los Angeles, “Only one way to succeed in a city? Dark-eyed Junco urban adaptation across Southern California”
Paul Dougherty, University of Wyoming, “The role of adaptive divergence in maintaining reproductive isolation between hybridizing species”
Braelei Hardt, University of Northern Colorado, “Assessing the Influences of Habitat Structure on Bird Song Propagation”
John Herbert, “Shorebird Migration on the Gulf of Mexico, Linking Wetlands Across America”
Jessica Hightower, University of Florida, “Changes in the trophic dynamics of understory bird communities across a gradient of habitat conversion in Borneo”
Brandon Hoenig, Duquesne University, “Using stable isotope analysis to investigate adult provisioning plasticity and nestling developmental consequences triggered by limitations in preferred prey”
Jennifer Houtz, Cornell University, “Impacts of gut microbiota on developmental temperature priming in birds”
Libby Natola, University of British Columbia, “Reproductive isolation in a rare three-species hybrid zone of woodpeckers”
Teresa Pegan, University of Michigan, “Can variation in dispersal predict the evolution of migration?”
Ari Rice, Villanova University, “Prevalence, host specificity, and seasonal patterns of haemosporidian parasites within hybridizing chickadee populations”
Matthew Ridenour, Oklahoma State University, “Hormonal Mediators of Sibling Rivalry in Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis)”
Michael Rowley, Villanova University, “Investigating Cognitive Impairment in Hybrid Chickadee Social Networks”
Katie Schroeder, University of Massachusetts, “A timeline and mechanism for species-specific song discrimination in nestling passerines”
Morgan Slevin, Florida Atlantic University, “Smarts and symbiosis: elucidating the relationship between the microbiome and cognitive performance in birds”
Allison Snider, Louisiana State University, “Metabarcoding of Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima) diet: How do oil and hurricanes alter food webs and bird resource use?”
Oona Takano, University of New Mexico, “Effects of the Pleistocene megafaunal extinction on raptor morphology and dietary niche”
Mary Woodruff, Indiana University, Bloomington, “Do Behavior and Gene Regulation Respond and Acclimate to Heat?”
Mewaldt-King Award
Joanne Kingsbury, The Ohio State University, “Threatened Birds, Dynamic Habitats and Disturbance: Conserving Birds in One of the Worlds Most Threatened and Understudied Savanna Ecosystems”
Margaret Morse Nice Award
Monica Carlson, Princeton University, “Does social dominance mimicry explain plumage similarity in ‘look-alike’ woodpeckers?”
Josselyn Van Tyne Memorial Research Award
Victoria Farrar, University of California Davis, “How does prolactin affect trade-offs in reproductive behavior during avian biparental care?”
Shailee Shah, Columbia University, “Direct Benefits of Group Living in a Cooperatively Breeding Species with Low Group Relatedness”
Alexander Wetmore Memorial Research Award
Marcos Caiafa Sepulveda, University of Florida, “Revealing unknown interactions: the role of Patagonian tapaculos (Rhinocryptidae) on the dispersal of endemic truffles”
Andreia Malpica, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, “The Role of the Environment in Genomic Differentiation: The Case of the Sinaloa Wren”
Andre Moncrieff, Louisiana State University, “Multiple hybrid zones in a widespread Amazonian bird reveal different evolutionary processes”
Diego Ocampo, University of Miami, “Contrasting the genotypic, phenotypic and behavioral divergence at the earliest stages of speciation”
Maria Smith, Princeton University, “Division of Labor and its Fitness Implications in a Cooperatively Breeding Bird”
Ben Vernasco, Virginia Tech, “Are telomere dynamics reflective of individual condition or the tradeoff between survival and reproduction in male wire-tailed manakins?”
Postdoctoral Research Awards
Aurore Canoville, NC State University / NC Museum of Natural Sciences, “Do female penguins deposit medullary bone?”
Michael Harvey, University of Tennessee, “The impact of a recent river avulsion on avian distributions along the Ucayali River in Peru”
Allison Johnson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “Testing the causes of intraspecific variation in social behavior across an ecological gradient”
Angela Medina-Garcia, University of Colorado Boulder, “Impacts of Social Breeding on the Evolution of Cognition”
Sarah Schulwitz, The Peregrine Fund, “The first genetic assessment of the American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) subspecies complex: a phylogeny based on whole genome sequencing”
Jessica van der Wal, The Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, “Honeyguide-human mutualism: local variations in honey-hunter signalling”
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