Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics
My current teaching includes a course with complementary classroom and field components that I developed and have led for six years in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Cornell University. The overarching goal of this course is for undergraduate students to actively participate in every stage of the scientific process, from formulation of questions to study design and data analysis. I created this year-long class under a model at Cornell University that involves a classroom component during the Fall semester, a three-week field research trip to Patagonia (Argentina) during the winter break, and finally a second in-class component during the Spring semester. The rationale for structuring the course in this way is to be able to teach students about experimental design and provide them the statistical tools they will need to formulate questions and gather their own data in the field. I then focus the second classroom component on data analysis and scientific writing. I also aim to teach students about the biodiversity and natural history of Patagonia, where I lived for a significant portion of my life, and the specific conservation challenges it faces.
See the course website here. |
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International Scholar Research Support Program
Technological advances in sequencing techniques have empowered researchers working in non-model organisms. Genomic tools have changed the questions we can answer, whether exploring topics on phylogeography or seeking to understand the connections between genotypes and phenotypes that are relevant to speciation and local adaptation. However, these new tools are not easily accessible to all scientists. As the field moves forward at a rapid pace, researchers from different parts of the world seek training to be able to take advantage of these genomic tools in their own research. In 2014 I created and now direct the International Scholars Research Support Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which fosters collaborations with international researchers and students seeking to use genomic tools to answer questions relevant to avian evolutionary biology. These collaborations serve the double purpose of addressing specific research questions and enhancing the participating scholars’ skills with the genomic tools/bioinformatics pipelines that we use routinely in our research unit. The overarching goal of this program is for our international colleagues to expand their expertise in applying genomic tools to questions in evolution, ecology, behavior, and conservation, and to use these techniques in subsequent studies and/or to teach them to their students/colleagues at their home institutions. In recent years, I have enjoyed hosting over 20 visitors, including three Fulbright Scholars, from countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Great Britain, Germany, and Israel, as well as from numerous institutions within the USA. I aim to teach the molecular and bioinformatic approaches needed to deploy techniques such as reduced representation genomic approaches (e.g., ddRADseq), whole-genome sequencing, and reference genome sequencing and assembly.
See the program website here. |