Welcome to the Scordato lab! We investigate the effects of anthropogenic activity on the behavior, ecology, and evolution of birds. We use a variety of tools to ask these questions, including next-generation sequencing and genomic analysis, behavioral observations, and long-term ecological and climatic datasets.
We currently have two major projects in the lab: examining how long-term human landscape modification has shaped the evolutionary history of swiftlets and swallows in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and assessing wildlife biodiversity, functional ecology, and habitat use in complex agroecosystems in Southern California. Check out our research page for more information about our work.
We currently have two major projects in the lab: examining how long-term human landscape modification has shaped the evolutionary history of swiftlets and swallows in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and assessing wildlife biodiversity, functional ecology, and habitat use in complex agroecosystems in Southern California. Check out our research page for more information about our work.
Lab news & updates
October 2025: Our agroecosystem work is getting a big boost with a new grant from NASA! Led by PI Erin Questad and co-PI Rachel Blakey, we are going to start integrating several years of field surveys with remote sensing data, as well as establish a new geospatial research and training institute (called SPACES) at Cal Poly. Very excited to see where this leads.
September 2025: Carson received a research grant from the California Avocado Commission for her work on bee pollinators. Great job, Carson!
September 2025: Emma was awarded a graduate fellowship from the ARI USDA NIFA program. Congrats, Emma!
August 2025: Congratulations to Sam and Alexis, who both successfully defended their theses! Truly incredible work. We are going to miss you both so much!
May 2025: Liz, Sam, and Alexis had an action-packed two-week field season in Borneo. So excited about all the new data we collected...
April 2025: Emma and Carson defended their thesis proposals in an epic double-header morning. They did a fantastic job! So proud of the great students in the lab.
April 2025: Congrats to Carson and Emma, who were awarded the Peter Castro and Rachel Carson departmental scholarships in recognition of their exceptional thesis research. Great job!
April 2025: Awesome undergrad research students Ian Garcia, Jordyn Scott, and Valentina Eppers (and lab-adjacent student Abby Yuen) presented posters on their research at the College of Science Research Symposium. Great job everyone! Plus Ian and Abby were accepted to REU fellowships for the summer. So many great young scientists doing cool work!
March 2025: New paper! Former Master's student Brenda Ramirez published her thesis work in Journal of Biogeography. She shows that incorporating long-term human land-use change into species distribution models generates very different predictions about how habitat availability changes over time, particularly for human-commensal species. This was a fun collaboration with Jamie Kass, Amanda Zellmer, and Amanda Hund. Great work, Brenda
March 2025: Congratulations to Sam, who was accepted into the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ph.D. program at UC Riverside! She will be continuing her interest in genomic research in Dr. Alan Brelsford's lab. We are so excited for you, Sam!
December 2024: Christian defended his thesis! He did an incredible job, and we are going to miss him in the lab!
December 2024: Another new paper! Liz is a co-author on a paper led by Drew Schield published in Science. This study leverages over a decade of international fieldwork to demonstrate contributions of sexual selection to reproductive isolation in barn swallows.
December 2024: Emma and Carson were both awarded fellowships from the Utom Conservation Fund in recognition of their excellent thesis research on the Utom/Santa Clara River. Congrats, Emma and Carson!
November 2024: New paper! Liz co-authored an opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on how to understand human-commensalism in an ecological and evolutionary framework. This was a fun collaboration led by NIOO-KNAW Ph.D. student Ruth Fawthrop.
October 2024: Emma was awarded a grant for her research from the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society. Awesome work, Emma!
September 2024: New paper! Liz has a new paper on the role of male competition in speciation in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, with collaborators Alycia Lackey, Robin Tinghitella, Rob Heathcote and Jason Keagy. This paper came on and off the back burner for about six years, so it's exciting to have it published!
August 2024: We're excited to welcome two new grad students, Emma Miller and Carson Loudermelt, to the lab. They will both be working on our agricultural biodiversity project in Ventura County.
June 2024: Another fantastic international field season under our belts! Liz, Sam, and Alexis spent a month in Borneo sampling swallows and swiftlets with a team of great collaborators. Very excited to dig into the data, part of which will be in Alexis's thesis.
May 2024: Congratulations to Sam and Alexis, who both passed their proposals with flying colors AND were both awarded the Peter Castro Biodiversity Scholarship from the CPP Biology department. A great first year of grad school!
March 2024: New paper! Liz was part of a perspective piece published in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnaean Society. This is the first paper to emerge from our Special Topics Network on Integrating Speciation Research and was a lot of fun to put together.
January 2024: We had a successful three weeks sampling welcome swallows in New Zealand. These samples will be part of Sam's thesis on the genetic mechanisms underlying rapid changes in migratory behavior. We ate our weight in meat pies and instant ramen, saw tons of sheep, and even saw little penguins emerging from the sea. A great return to international fieldwork!
October 2023: New paper! Our first genomics paper on Oceanic Swallows is out in Evolution. This paper was co-led by Grant and Brian with colleagues Nick Friedman, Sampath Seneviratne, Thilini Thakshila, Chamalka de Silva, Farah Mohd-Taib, Dency Gawin, Penigran Sahlan and Amanda Hund. We show that evolutionary lability of dispersal behavior contributes to population structure in Pacific swallows- and we confirm designations of some new species. Excited to see all this hard work come together so nicely.
October 2023: Christian was awarded a fellowship from the Utom River Conservation Fund in recognition of the conservation value of his research. Incredible work, Christian!
September 2023: Christian was awarded a one-year graduate fellowship from the ARI. Congrats, Christian!
June 2023: The lab went to the Evolution conference! Brian gave a talk and Sam, Dylan, and Alexis all gave posters. So great to see everyone's amazing research progress.
June 2023: We had an intensive week of fieldwork in the Santa Clara River Valley setting up pollinator traps, digging trenches for drift fences, putting up bat monitors, and surveying birds. Our new ARI/CDFA-IPM project is off to an exciting start!
May 2023: Christian successfully defended his proposal, and Sam and Dylan graduated. Congratulations, everyone!
April 2023: Christian received a grant from the Pasadena Audubon Society for his thesis research. Awesome work, Christian!
March 2023: Dylan and Sam gave their first presentations at the CPP RSCA conference. They both did a great job!
March 2023: Several weeks of good news! Brian will be starting as an assistant professor at Eastern Oregon University in fall 2023, and Rachel will begin a Ph.D. at North Dakota State. We will miss Brian and Rachel in the lab but are very excited about their next chapters.
February 2023: Our agroecosystem project in Ventura County received three years of funding from the CDFA/ARI integrated pest management program! We are excited to hugely expand the scope of this project and work on improving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes with a great team of scientists (including Erin Questad, Rachel Blakey, Adam Lambert, Ted Stankowich, Ben Faber, and Hamutahl Cohen), farmers, and non-profits.
August 2022: We're very excited to welcome Christian Cormier as a new Master's student in the lab. Welcome, Christian!
July 2022: Grant defended his thesis! Awesome work, Grant.
July 2022: Most of the lab went to the AOS meeting in Puerto Rico. Brenda, Grant, Rachel, and Brian all gave great talks, and Sam gave her first poster. Amazing job, everyone!
May 2022: Brenda defended her thesis! Terrific work, Brenda. Brenda is off to lead the urban parrot project at Occidental College- we are going to miss her!
April 2022: everyone in the lab presented their research at the College of Science Research Symposium. Fantastic to see so much great work in one spot.
December 2021: Genomic data from the Tahitian swallows is back, and it's really cool! We're excited to be writing the first paper of our Oceanic swallow work.
September 2021: The semester is off to a busy start, and we have welcomed several new undergraduate researchers into the lab (several of whom started working over the summer)! Welcome Annemarie, Austin, Lauryn, Alexis, Sam, and Antawn!
August 2021: Rachel passed her proposal defense! Amazing work, Rachel!
Summer 2021: Lots of activity over the summer! Everyone presented their data at the Evolution and AOS virtual meetings. Brenda received an Honorable Mention for Best Student Talk at AOS- incredible work, Brenda! Liz was able to do two weeks of fieldwork in Tahiti and collected the first genetic samples of Tahitian swallows. We are excited to see where they fit on our Oceanic swallow tree.
June 2021: Rachel was awarded a research grant from the Sea and Sage Audubon Society! This will fund Rachel's work on avian biodiversity in a complex agroecosystem. Nice work, Rachel!
May 2021: Grant was awarded a research grant from the Society of Systematic Biologists! This will fund his thesis research on Oceanic swallows. Great job, Grant!
April 2021: Brenda, Grant, and Rachel were all awarded scholarships from the CPP Biology department. Awesome work, everyone!
March 2021: Congratulations to Brenda for winning a student talk award at the Cal Poly Pomona student research conference! She will now represent Cal Poly at the CSU-wide student research competition. Amazing work, Brenda!
January 2021: Congratulations to Brenda, Grant, and Rachel, who all submitted great AOS research proposals!
December 2020: Congratulations to Grant, who did a terrific job on his thesis proposal defense. Great work, Grant!
November 2020: We are excited to welcome new postdoc Dr. Brian Myers to the lab! Brian did his undergraduate degree at Cal Poly and his Ph.D. at SDSU with Dr. Kevin Burns. Brian will be working on our NSF-funded Oceanic swallow grant and has a mountain of genomic data awaiting him. Welcome, Brian!
October 2020: After lots of hard work, Brenda and Grant submitted terrific GRFP applications. Fingers crossed!
September 2020: Brenda did an amazing job on her thesis proposal defense. Congratulations, Brenda!
August 2020: Congratulations to Masters student Brenda Ramirez, who gave a great lightning talk at the 2020 NAOC virtual meeting. Awesome job, Brenda!
June 2020: At long last, our paper on phenotypic variation in Chinese barn swallows is accepted by BJLS! This paper was led by former Queen Mary University PhD student Liu Yu and is his second thesis chapter to be published.
May 2020: We are very excited to welcome a new Master's student, Rachel Bockrath. Rachel will join the lab in the fall and will be studying birds inhabiting complex agricultural landscapes as part of our new ARI grant. Welcome, Rachel!
April 2020: Liz was awarded a grant from the CSU Agricultural Research Institute to study wildlife biodiversity in complex agricultural landscapes- along with awesome co-PIs Erin Questad, Eric Wood, and David Still. We're excited to start a local California project.
March 2020: Brenda, Cathy, Aurora, and Noel all gave great talks and posters on their research at the CPP RSCA conference. Well done, team!
February 2020: Lots of great accomplishments in the lab this semester! Noel Martinez was accepted into the PhD program at Lehigh University. Congratulations, Noel!
February 2020: Aurora presented a great poster on her research on boldness behavior in urban birds at the Southern California Animal Behavior Conference. Amazing work, Aurora!
January 2020: We are excited to welcome a new Master's student, Grant Broyles, to the lab. Grant will be working on population genomics in Oceanic swallows. Welcome, Grant!
December 2019: Exciting news! Liz was awarded a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue our work on Pacific and welcome swallows. We're excited to do more fieldwork and sequencing in the near future, as well as hire some new team members...
November 2019: New paper out! Liz's paper on barn swallow migratory divides is now online at Ecology Letters. Check it out!
October 2019: October already? We have had a busy semester, with everyone making great progress on their projects.
July 2019: New preprint up on bioRxiv! http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/698597v1. This is the culmination of many years of work studying continent-wide patterns of hybridization and migratory behavior in barn swallows. Excited to have it moving forward.
June 2019: Liz had great trips to the Evolution and Ornithology meetings. Meanwhile, Aurora is studying frogs as part of her REU program in Puerto Rico, Brenda is doing outreach in the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon, Noel has been monitoring urban bird communities in SoCal as part of the RISE program, and Cathy is developing approaches for studying pesticide contaminants on swallow feathers. A busy and productive summer for everyone so far!
May 2019: Liz returned from an amazing workshop and symposium for early career researchers in Animal Behavior. Thanks to Claire Horner-Devine, Emilia Martins, and the National Science Foundation for such an incredible experience.
May 2019: New paper out in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on using networks to study fertilizations and social interactions in hybrid zones
May 2019: Brenda Ramirez was accepted to a summer internship program run by Environment of the Americas! She will be doing field research and science outreach in Siuslaw National Forest before starting her Masters research back in the lab this fall. Congrats, Brenda!
April 2019: Undergraduate students Brenda Ramirez, Cathy Trejo, and Aurora Willamsen presented their research at the CPP College of Science research symposium! They did an amazing job on their posters.
April 2019: Liz was awarded a New Investigator grant from CSUPERB and a Provost's Teacher-Scholar award from Cal Poly! These grants will fund our Oceanic swallow project.
April 2019: Liz had a successful stint of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, with only a mild case of dengue fever at the end...
March 2019: Congratulations to undergraduate student Aurora Williamsen, who was accepted to a summer REU program in Puerto Rico!
March 2019: Spring break plans are all set: two weeks of fieldwork in Sri Lanka with our collaborators at the University of Colombo. Excited to finally see some hill swallows.
February 2019: The semester is officially underway, with a new Animal Behavior class and lots of grant deadlines!
December 2018: Great wrap up to the semester, with PopGen students giving presentations on data they analyzed. Now ready for break + grant writing
November 2018: Seminar at OSU! Liz had a great time as a student-invited speaker, and got to catch up with PhD student Caroline Glidden- a former field assistant and CU alum. She is crushing it as a grad student.
November 2018: New paper out in Molecular Ecology! Demographic modeling by Chris Smith indicates extremely recent divergence in barn swallows- potentially facilitated by nesting in human structures.
October 2018: Liz had a great time giving a seminar at the other Cal Poly campus in San Luis Obispo. It's not often that you get to give a seminar and go surfing in the same trip. Thanks to Clint Francis for the invite!
October 2018: Month of papers continues. My longest-gestating paper, on how male competition drives song divergence in the greenish warbler ring species, is out at Evolution
October 2018: New paper out! Something a little different: Amanda Hund and I led a seminar on leadership and mentorship in science at the University of Colorado, and along with with several great co-authors, turned what we learned into a paper.
September 2018: Fall semester off to a busy start!
August 2018: Liz attended the International Ornithological Congress in Vancouver. It was so fun to participate in a great symposium on using genomic approaches to study sexual selection and speciation in the field.
July 2018: Pacific swallow samples shipped out for whole-genome sequencing. So excited to see what we find...
June 2018: New project studying Pacific swallows in southeast Asia with Amanda Hund was a wild success! Time to start sequencing...
May 2018: Had such fun giving a seminar at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Part of a great week catching Pacific swallows and talking with interesting scientists.
April 2018: New paper led by Liu Yu out in the Journal of Ornithology. This is a nice thesis chapter showing sexual selection for dark plumage color in a population of barn swallows in northeastern China.
March 2018: New field season! Liz is in Malaysia, Japan, and Fiji for two months starting a new project on Pacific swallows. I'll be posting updates for Miles O'Brien productions- check back regularly.
March 2018: First quarter of teaching done! So impressed and proud of the pop gen students, who finished the class by giving presentations on data they analyzed in R.
February 2018: Liz wrote a guest post for milesobrien.com on how human activity may shape signaling systems in birds. Such a fun experience, and so great to be able to write about evolution for a broader audience.
February 2018: After a massive and stressful push, proposal submitted to the NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity program! Fingers crossed for funding...
February 2018: Liz had a great time giving a seminar at UC Riverside. It's been fun getting to know the SoCal evolutionary biology community.
January 2018: Nice paper by Matt Wilkins accepted at BJLS! This paper describes song variation across most of the barn swallow complex. It also includes data from one of my top ten most harrowing days of fieldwork, when Matt, Georgy, and I were questioned by a jeep full of Russian soldiers after we unknowingly wandered too close to a Russian military base with a bunch of fancy song recording equipment.
January 2018: The Scordato lab has officially started at Cal Poly Pomona! It's so exciting to be here. Check out the new lab website!
September 2025: Carson received a research grant from the California Avocado Commission for her work on bee pollinators. Great job, Carson!
September 2025: Emma was awarded a graduate fellowship from the ARI USDA NIFA program. Congrats, Emma!
August 2025: Congratulations to Sam and Alexis, who both successfully defended their theses! Truly incredible work. We are going to miss you both so much!
May 2025: Liz, Sam, and Alexis had an action-packed two-week field season in Borneo. So excited about all the new data we collected...
April 2025: Emma and Carson defended their thesis proposals in an epic double-header morning. They did a fantastic job! So proud of the great students in the lab.
April 2025: Congrats to Carson and Emma, who were awarded the Peter Castro and Rachel Carson departmental scholarships in recognition of their exceptional thesis research. Great job!
April 2025: Awesome undergrad research students Ian Garcia, Jordyn Scott, and Valentina Eppers (and lab-adjacent student Abby Yuen) presented posters on their research at the College of Science Research Symposium. Great job everyone! Plus Ian and Abby were accepted to REU fellowships for the summer. So many great young scientists doing cool work!
March 2025: New paper! Former Master's student Brenda Ramirez published her thesis work in Journal of Biogeography. She shows that incorporating long-term human land-use change into species distribution models generates very different predictions about how habitat availability changes over time, particularly for human-commensal species. This was a fun collaboration with Jamie Kass, Amanda Zellmer, and Amanda Hund. Great work, Brenda
March 2025: Congratulations to Sam, who was accepted into the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ph.D. program at UC Riverside! She will be continuing her interest in genomic research in Dr. Alan Brelsford's lab. We are so excited for you, Sam!
December 2024: Christian defended his thesis! He did an incredible job, and we are going to miss him in the lab!
December 2024: Another new paper! Liz is a co-author on a paper led by Drew Schield published in Science. This study leverages over a decade of international fieldwork to demonstrate contributions of sexual selection to reproductive isolation in barn swallows.
December 2024: Emma and Carson were both awarded fellowships from the Utom Conservation Fund in recognition of their excellent thesis research on the Utom/Santa Clara River. Congrats, Emma and Carson!
November 2024: New paper! Liz co-authored an opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on how to understand human-commensalism in an ecological and evolutionary framework. This was a fun collaboration led by NIOO-KNAW Ph.D. student Ruth Fawthrop.
October 2024: Emma was awarded a grant for her research from the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society. Awesome work, Emma!
September 2024: New paper! Liz has a new paper on the role of male competition in speciation in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, with collaborators Alycia Lackey, Robin Tinghitella, Rob Heathcote and Jason Keagy. This paper came on and off the back burner for about six years, so it's exciting to have it published!
August 2024: We're excited to welcome two new grad students, Emma Miller and Carson Loudermelt, to the lab. They will both be working on our agricultural biodiversity project in Ventura County.
June 2024: Another fantastic international field season under our belts! Liz, Sam, and Alexis spent a month in Borneo sampling swallows and swiftlets with a team of great collaborators. Very excited to dig into the data, part of which will be in Alexis's thesis.
May 2024: Congratulations to Sam and Alexis, who both passed their proposals with flying colors AND were both awarded the Peter Castro Biodiversity Scholarship from the CPP Biology department. A great first year of grad school!
March 2024: New paper! Liz was part of a perspective piece published in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnaean Society. This is the first paper to emerge from our Special Topics Network on Integrating Speciation Research and was a lot of fun to put together.
January 2024: We had a successful three weeks sampling welcome swallows in New Zealand. These samples will be part of Sam's thesis on the genetic mechanisms underlying rapid changes in migratory behavior. We ate our weight in meat pies and instant ramen, saw tons of sheep, and even saw little penguins emerging from the sea. A great return to international fieldwork!
October 2023: New paper! Our first genomics paper on Oceanic Swallows is out in Evolution. This paper was co-led by Grant and Brian with colleagues Nick Friedman, Sampath Seneviratne, Thilini Thakshila, Chamalka de Silva, Farah Mohd-Taib, Dency Gawin, Penigran Sahlan and Amanda Hund. We show that evolutionary lability of dispersal behavior contributes to population structure in Pacific swallows- and we confirm designations of some new species. Excited to see all this hard work come together so nicely.
October 2023: Christian was awarded a fellowship from the Utom River Conservation Fund in recognition of the conservation value of his research. Incredible work, Christian!
September 2023: Christian was awarded a one-year graduate fellowship from the ARI. Congrats, Christian!
June 2023: The lab went to the Evolution conference! Brian gave a talk and Sam, Dylan, and Alexis all gave posters. So great to see everyone's amazing research progress.
June 2023: We had an intensive week of fieldwork in the Santa Clara River Valley setting up pollinator traps, digging trenches for drift fences, putting up bat monitors, and surveying birds. Our new ARI/CDFA-IPM project is off to an exciting start!
May 2023: Christian successfully defended his proposal, and Sam and Dylan graduated. Congratulations, everyone!
April 2023: Christian received a grant from the Pasadena Audubon Society for his thesis research. Awesome work, Christian!
March 2023: Dylan and Sam gave their first presentations at the CPP RSCA conference. They both did a great job!
March 2023: Several weeks of good news! Brian will be starting as an assistant professor at Eastern Oregon University in fall 2023, and Rachel will begin a Ph.D. at North Dakota State. We will miss Brian and Rachel in the lab but are very excited about their next chapters.
February 2023: Our agroecosystem project in Ventura County received three years of funding from the CDFA/ARI integrated pest management program! We are excited to hugely expand the scope of this project and work on improving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes with a great team of scientists (including Erin Questad, Rachel Blakey, Adam Lambert, Ted Stankowich, Ben Faber, and Hamutahl Cohen), farmers, and non-profits.
August 2022: We're very excited to welcome Christian Cormier as a new Master's student in the lab. Welcome, Christian!
July 2022: Grant defended his thesis! Awesome work, Grant.
July 2022: Most of the lab went to the AOS meeting in Puerto Rico. Brenda, Grant, Rachel, and Brian all gave great talks, and Sam gave her first poster. Amazing job, everyone!
May 2022: Brenda defended her thesis! Terrific work, Brenda. Brenda is off to lead the urban parrot project at Occidental College- we are going to miss her!
April 2022: everyone in the lab presented their research at the College of Science Research Symposium. Fantastic to see so much great work in one spot.
December 2021: Genomic data from the Tahitian swallows is back, and it's really cool! We're excited to be writing the first paper of our Oceanic swallow work.
September 2021: The semester is off to a busy start, and we have welcomed several new undergraduate researchers into the lab (several of whom started working over the summer)! Welcome Annemarie, Austin, Lauryn, Alexis, Sam, and Antawn!
August 2021: Rachel passed her proposal defense! Amazing work, Rachel!
Summer 2021: Lots of activity over the summer! Everyone presented their data at the Evolution and AOS virtual meetings. Brenda received an Honorable Mention for Best Student Talk at AOS- incredible work, Brenda! Liz was able to do two weeks of fieldwork in Tahiti and collected the first genetic samples of Tahitian swallows. We are excited to see where they fit on our Oceanic swallow tree.
June 2021: Rachel was awarded a research grant from the Sea and Sage Audubon Society! This will fund Rachel's work on avian biodiversity in a complex agroecosystem. Nice work, Rachel!
May 2021: Grant was awarded a research grant from the Society of Systematic Biologists! This will fund his thesis research on Oceanic swallows. Great job, Grant!
April 2021: Brenda, Grant, and Rachel were all awarded scholarships from the CPP Biology department. Awesome work, everyone!
March 2021: Congratulations to Brenda for winning a student talk award at the Cal Poly Pomona student research conference! She will now represent Cal Poly at the CSU-wide student research competition. Amazing work, Brenda!
January 2021: Congratulations to Brenda, Grant, and Rachel, who all submitted great AOS research proposals!
December 2020: Congratulations to Grant, who did a terrific job on his thesis proposal defense. Great work, Grant!
November 2020: We are excited to welcome new postdoc Dr. Brian Myers to the lab! Brian did his undergraduate degree at Cal Poly and his Ph.D. at SDSU with Dr. Kevin Burns. Brian will be working on our NSF-funded Oceanic swallow grant and has a mountain of genomic data awaiting him. Welcome, Brian!
October 2020: After lots of hard work, Brenda and Grant submitted terrific GRFP applications. Fingers crossed!
September 2020: Brenda did an amazing job on her thesis proposal defense. Congratulations, Brenda!
August 2020: Congratulations to Masters student Brenda Ramirez, who gave a great lightning talk at the 2020 NAOC virtual meeting. Awesome job, Brenda!
June 2020: At long last, our paper on phenotypic variation in Chinese barn swallows is accepted by BJLS! This paper was led by former Queen Mary University PhD student Liu Yu and is his second thesis chapter to be published.
May 2020: We are very excited to welcome a new Master's student, Rachel Bockrath. Rachel will join the lab in the fall and will be studying birds inhabiting complex agricultural landscapes as part of our new ARI grant. Welcome, Rachel!
April 2020: Liz was awarded a grant from the CSU Agricultural Research Institute to study wildlife biodiversity in complex agricultural landscapes- along with awesome co-PIs Erin Questad, Eric Wood, and David Still. We're excited to start a local California project.
March 2020: Brenda, Cathy, Aurora, and Noel all gave great talks and posters on their research at the CPP RSCA conference. Well done, team!
February 2020: Lots of great accomplishments in the lab this semester! Noel Martinez was accepted into the PhD program at Lehigh University. Congratulations, Noel!
February 2020: Aurora presented a great poster on her research on boldness behavior in urban birds at the Southern California Animal Behavior Conference. Amazing work, Aurora!
January 2020: We are excited to welcome a new Master's student, Grant Broyles, to the lab. Grant will be working on population genomics in Oceanic swallows. Welcome, Grant!
December 2019: Exciting news! Liz was awarded a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue our work on Pacific and welcome swallows. We're excited to do more fieldwork and sequencing in the near future, as well as hire some new team members...
November 2019: New paper out! Liz's paper on barn swallow migratory divides is now online at Ecology Letters. Check it out!
October 2019: October already? We have had a busy semester, with everyone making great progress on their projects.
July 2019: New preprint up on bioRxiv! http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/698597v1. This is the culmination of many years of work studying continent-wide patterns of hybridization and migratory behavior in barn swallows. Excited to have it moving forward.
June 2019: Liz had great trips to the Evolution and Ornithology meetings. Meanwhile, Aurora is studying frogs as part of her REU program in Puerto Rico, Brenda is doing outreach in the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon, Noel has been monitoring urban bird communities in SoCal as part of the RISE program, and Cathy is developing approaches for studying pesticide contaminants on swallow feathers. A busy and productive summer for everyone so far!
May 2019: Liz returned from an amazing workshop and symposium for early career researchers in Animal Behavior. Thanks to Claire Horner-Devine, Emilia Martins, and the National Science Foundation for such an incredible experience.
May 2019: New paper out in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on using networks to study fertilizations and social interactions in hybrid zones
May 2019: Brenda Ramirez was accepted to a summer internship program run by Environment of the Americas! She will be doing field research and science outreach in Siuslaw National Forest before starting her Masters research back in the lab this fall. Congrats, Brenda!
April 2019: Undergraduate students Brenda Ramirez, Cathy Trejo, and Aurora Willamsen presented their research at the CPP College of Science research symposium! They did an amazing job on their posters.
April 2019: Liz was awarded a New Investigator grant from CSUPERB and a Provost's Teacher-Scholar award from Cal Poly! These grants will fund our Oceanic swallow project.
April 2019: Liz had a successful stint of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, with only a mild case of dengue fever at the end...
March 2019: Congratulations to undergraduate student Aurora Williamsen, who was accepted to a summer REU program in Puerto Rico!
March 2019: Spring break plans are all set: two weeks of fieldwork in Sri Lanka with our collaborators at the University of Colombo. Excited to finally see some hill swallows.
February 2019: The semester is officially underway, with a new Animal Behavior class and lots of grant deadlines!
December 2018: Great wrap up to the semester, with PopGen students giving presentations on data they analyzed. Now ready for break + grant writing
November 2018: Seminar at OSU! Liz had a great time as a student-invited speaker, and got to catch up with PhD student Caroline Glidden- a former field assistant and CU alum. She is crushing it as a grad student.
November 2018: New paper out in Molecular Ecology! Demographic modeling by Chris Smith indicates extremely recent divergence in barn swallows- potentially facilitated by nesting in human structures.
October 2018: Liz had a great time giving a seminar at the other Cal Poly campus in San Luis Obispo. It's not often that you get to give a seminar and go surfing in the same trip. Thanks to Clint Francis for the invite!
October 2018: Month of papers continues. My longest-gestating paper, on how male competition drives song divergence in the greenish warbler ring species, is out at Evolution
October 2018: New paper out! Something a little different: Amanda Hund and I led a seminar on leadership and mentorship in science at the University of Colorado, and along with with several great co-authors, turned what we learned into a paper.
September 2018: Fall semester off to a busy start!
August 2018: Liz attended the International Ornithological Congress in Vancouver. It was so fun to participate in a great symposium on using genomic approaches to study sexual selection and speciation in the field.
July 2018: Pacific swallow samples shipped out for whole-genome sequencing. So excited to see what we find...
June 2018: New project studying Pacific swallows in southeast Asia with Amanda Hund was a wild success! Time to start sequencing...
May 2018: Had such fun giving a seminar at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Part of a great week catching Pacific swallows and talking with interesting scientists.
April 2018: New paper led by Liu Yu out in the Journal of Ornithology. This is a nice thesis chapter showing sexual selection for dark plumage color in a population of barn swallows in northeastern China.
March 2018: New field season! Liz is in Malaysia, Japan, and Fiji for two months starting a new project on Pacific swallows. I'll be posting updates for Miles O'Brien productions- check back regularly.
March 2018: First quarter of teaching done! So impressed and proud of the pop gen students, who finished the class by giving presentations on data they analyzed in R.
February 2018: Liz wrote a guest post for milesobrien.com on how human activity may shape signaling systems in birds. Such a fun experience, and so great to be able to write about evolution for a broader audience.
February 2018: After a massive and stressful push, proposal submitted to the NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity program! Fingers crossed for funding...
February 2018: Liz had a great time giving a seminar at UC Riverside. It's been fun getting to know the SoCal evolutionary biology community.
January 2018: Nice paper by Matt Wilkins accepted at BJLS! This paper describes song variation across most of the barn swallow complex. It also includes data from one of my top ten most harrowing days of fieldwork, when Matt, Georgy, and I were questioned by a jeep full of Russian soldiers after we unknowingly wandered too close to a Russian military base with a bunch of fancy song recording equipment.
January 2018: The Scordato lab has officially started at Cal Poly Pomona! It's so exciting to be here. Check out the new lab website!