Liz Scordato, PI

Liz is an evolutionary biologist interested in the causes of large-scale phenotypic and genomic variation, and the consequences of this variation for population divergence and speciation. She is particularly interested in how mate choice, migratory behavior, and anthropogenic landscape modification shape gene flow and reproductive isolation among populations.

Liz received her B.Sc. from Duke University, where she did her Honors thesis on olfactory communication in ringtailed lemurs with Dr. Christine Drea. She did her Ph.D. in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago with Dr. Trevor Price, where she studied interactions between sexual selection and ecology during population divergence in greenish warblers. She then did a postdoc on speciation genomics in barn swallows in Dr. Rebecca Safran's lab in in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado.

Liz joined the faculty of the Biological Sciences Department at Cal Poly Pomona as an assistant professor in January 2018. You can follow lab updates on Twitter at @LizScordato
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Grad students

Brenda Ramirez

Brenda is a first-year Masters student at Cal Poly. She is working on species distribution modeling for Pacific swallows, and is particularly focused on the effects of human land use change on the distribution of suitable swallow habitat.

Grant Broyles

Grant is a first-year Masters student at Cal Poly. He is studying the population genetics and evolutionary history of the Oceanic swallow clade. He is specifically focused on the genetic origins of commensal nesting behavior in these swallows. 

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Undergraduate students

Noel Martinez

Noel is senior general biology major in the RISE program at Cal Poly. He is interested in urban bird behavior and cognition, and is working on a project on avian community turnover across types of urban habitats in Los Angeles county.

Thilini Thakshila

Thilini is an undergraduate Honors student at the University of Colombo co-advised by Liz and Dr. Sampath Seneviratne. Thilini is studying Hill swallows for her Honors thesis, and is particularly focused on the consequences of increased human activity on swallow ecology.

Cathy Trejo

Cathy is a senior environmental studies major at Cal Poly. She developed methods to analyze variation in plumage color and patterning across the Pacific swallow range, and is now analyzing pesticide accumulation on Pacific and hill swallow feathers

Aurora Williamsen

Aurora is a junior biology major at Cal Poly, with a Zoology emphasis. She is interested in the effects of urbanization on bird behavior and conservation, and is studying flight initiation distance in a variety of urban bird species

Are you interested in joining the lab? We're recruiting undergraduate and graduate students! Contact Liz at escordato[at]cpp[dot]edu