OBE graduate student Erin McCullough awarded both an NSF predoctoral fellowship and a National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship. Erin studies flight behavior and flight performance in giant rhinoceros beetles. Large males produce disproportionately long horns, small males produce short horns, and females produce no horns, so rhinoceros beetles are an excellent opportunity for studying the functional costs of elaborate sexually, selected traits.
P.E.O. is a philanthropic and educational organization that supports women in higher education. The award is a competitive, national, merit-based scholarship for women that are within two-years of completing their PhDs or postdocs.
Erik Ashehoug, Ashley King, Dan Barton, Dan Atwater, Nora Lahr, Ashley Heers, and Erin McCullogh.
Cameron Naficy (M.S. UM December 2008) is now a Fulbright fellow studying tree and forest dynamics in response to global change at the Universidad Nacional de Comahue in Argentina with Tom Kitzberger.
Anna Sala’s paper titled “Height-related growth declines in ponderosa pine are not due to carbon limitation” (Sala A, Hoch G. 2009. Plant, Cell and Environment 32:22-30) was selected for Faculty of 1000 Biology.
Sean Gibbons, a student in the Microbial Ecology Program at The University of Montana, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct alternative energy research at Uppsala University in Sweden. He will work with Dr. Peter Lindblad, in the department of photochemistry and molecular science investigating cyanobacterial photobiological hydrogen production using a novel photobioreacter.
Read more on NSF predoctoral fellowship
Read more on the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship
Assistant Professor Creagh Breuner recently obtained a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. CAREER awards are the NSF's most prestigious awards for early-career scientists. Dr. Breuner’s project focuses on understanding mechanisms of variation in stress endocrinology in free-living birds. The focal species is the white-crowned sparrow, which Breuner has worked on in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Yosemite for more than 10 years.
Vanessa Ezenwa—an assistant professor in the Division—recently obtained a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. CAREER awards are the NSF's most prestigious awards for early-career scientists. Dr. Ezenwa’s project focuses on understanding how parasites shape animal behavior. Her work will be carried out in Africa on Grant’s gazelles, a species in which dominant males defend territories and subordinate males join roving bachelor herds. A key question of the work is whether parasites drive variation in mating tactics by influencing individual mating decisions, behavior and mating success.
How did birds take to the air? In a recent Nature paper Ken Dial and students Brandon Jackson and Paolo Segre propose a new hypothesis. Using common, ground-dwelling chukars [hyperlink to chukar picture], they analyzed how birds flap their wings across a juvenile-to-adult developmental sequence. Although birds at different stages used their wings very differently—early stages used them to assist running up inclines while adults used them for different kinds of flight—the wing stroke angle was remarkably conserved. Dial and colleagues argue that this conservation represents a fundamental bird wing stroke, which appears very early in development and can be used for a variety of purposes.
The authors then connect their developmental data to evolutionary origins of flight. In particular, they suggest that transitional stages during the evolution of flight correspond to the developmental sequence observed in chukars. In particular, proto-birds may have flapped their proto-wings, using the fundamental avian wing stroke—to flap-run over obstacles and control how they fell. Ultimately, these non-flying but aerodynamically-useful wings evolved into structure capable of performing level, flapping flight.
