I am pleased to announce that my molecular tool for efficiently capturing vision genes from any extant bird species has been published in Molecular Ecology Resources. This is an in-solution RNA bait probe set, and we demonstrate that it captures genes far more efficiently than whole genome sequencing. The probe set should be used when conducting broad surveys of vision gene evolution across a large number of samples, or when depth of coverage is needed, such as in population-level studies. Using the genes isolated by our probe set, we where then able to identify some interesting parallel evolution in genes between two very divergent avian lineages--both of which display cool vision phenotypes! Once again, thanks to friend and colleague Daniel J. Field for use of this beautiful American Oystercatcher photo! See my PUBS section for the paper.

I was delighted to take part in the National Eye Institute's first ever virtual Take Your Child to Work Day. This is an annual event where we lead ~30 kids through dissections of eyes of different species. This year we had a virtual dissection demo, and I was able to display a diversity of eyes and talk about their different adaptations.

Our combined molecular+morphological work on the Strisores (Chen et al. 2019) was given the cover of the September issue of Diversity! The image is a frogmouth skull, tone of the most highly modified members of Strisores. See my PUBS page for the paper.

I am delighted to share that our most recent publication, "A Phylogenomic Supertree of Birds," was selected as the cover for the latest issue of Diversity. The image is of a Black Jacobin (Florisuga fusca), taken by co-author Daniel Field.

In this article, we used supertree methods to integrate available avian phylogenomic trees, generating a large-scale tree covering ~7% of bird species. Our methods are computationally efficient and will facilitate continual updates as more phylogenomic data accumulate. See my PUBS page for the paper.