News

July 2024
Rose and Felix’s paper was featured on the cover of Genetics and Xuewen and Jeremy’s paper was published in Ecology and Evolution. Also congratulations to Elizabeth for getting a job at USFWS!

June 2024
First lab kayaking trip!

May 2024
Congratulations to Alex for graduating and receiving a Grace McCormack Fund for Biology Prize and the Ayman Amin-Salem Award! Also Faye got an AOS Student Research Grant and graduate student Brian Kirz officially joins the team.

April 2024
Faye posted a preprint on our new high-quality genome assembly and annotation for the Florida Scrub-Jay.

March 2024
Congratulations to Abby for winning a Beckman Scholarship!

January 2024
Excited to share Jeremy’s new preprint on modeling the impacts of increasing isolation and environmental variation on Florida Scrub-Jay demography. Also welcome to lab tech James Schmidt.

December 2023
Check out Xuewen and Jeremy’s new preprint on gull hybrid zone persistence. Also congratulations to Elizabeth for being selected as a finalist for the Smith Conservation Fellowship!

Oct 2023
Hope everyone had fun at the dept retreat yesterday! Congrats Jeremy for winning the Golden Pipette Award with Kevin Deem and Brian for winning the Spirit Award!

June 2023
Congratulations to Faye for winning a R. C. Lewontin Early Award!

June 2023
The lab had a fantastic time talking science at the annual Florida Scrub-Jay meeting at Archbold.

May 2023
We got together for lab brunch to celebrate our graduating seniors (Blue, Krisin, and Xuewen) and to start new lab traditions for celebrating both our successes (the win wall) and failures (rejection piñata) over the past year.

May 2023
Kristin and Xuewen both successfully defended their senior honors theses! Also, congratulations to Xuewen for receiving a Grace McCormack Fund for Biology Prize.

April 2023
Congrats to Jeremy for receiving the Edward Curtis Peck Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student!

March 2023
Shailee was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and Faye was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Hurray!

March 2023
Jeremy’s paper on the role of climate change and niche shifts in grackle range dynamics was published in Peer Community Journal, and postdoc Elizabeth Flesch is visiting the lab in person for a few months.

February 2023
Congratulations to Shailee for being selected as a finalist for the highly competitive Life Sciences Research Fellowship!

January 2023
Congratulations to Jeremy for winning a Rosemary Grant Advanced Award from the Society for the Study of Evolution! Also undergrads Abby Eckert, Jenna Savino, Vanita Shih, Allison Tilburg, and Blue Hovmand Warner joined the team.

September 2022
We welcome undergrads Alex Gaston, Cindy He, and Sally Ko to the lab.

August 2022
Congratulations to Kristin for winning the best undergraduate poster award at GLAM-Evogen!

July 2022
Congratulations to Shailee for winning the Animal Behavior Society’s Warner Clyde Allee Award for Best Student Paper! Also, welcome to new postdoc Daniel Seidman!

June 2022
Nancy was elected to the American Ornithological Society Council and our collaborative NSF grant on the role of immigration in population dynamics of Weddell seals was funded!

June 2022
Chen lab members past and present had a great time at the Evolution conference in Cleveland, and Shailee was a finalist for the Society for the Study of Evolution’s W.D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation.

June 2022
After many years of no fieldwork, we finally had a lab trip to Archbold to meet the jays and chat with collaborators in person.

May 2022
Check out Jeremy’s new preprint on the role of habitat in divergent range dynamics in grackles.

April 2022
Congratulations to Kristin for winning a Discover Grant and Undergraduate Diversity at Evolution Travel Award, and Jeremy for receiving an ASN Travel Award!

April 2022
The papers from the interdisciplinary “Nature, Data, and Power: How hegemonies shape biological knowledge” special section of The American Naturalist that Nancy co-edited are now online.

March 2022
Welcome to new postdoc Shailee Shah!

January 2022
Lab sledding party to celebrate Felix’s new permanent job as a Research Associate in Clinical Genome Interpretation at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Congratulations Felix and best wishes in your new position! Also undergrads Nandini Samanta and Xuewen Geng joined the team.

November 2021
Check out a new preprint from the lab on the impacts of sex-biased demography and sex-specific inheritance on short-term allele frequency dynamics, led by Felix and Rose.

October 2021
Nancy contributed to a perspective on empirical studies of indirect genetic effects that was published in the Journal of Heredity.

September 2021
We welcome graduate student Faye Romero and undergrads Siddarth Seenivasa, Sarah Chiaradonna, and Xinying Lu to the lab.

August 2021
Congratulations to Felix for winning a Poster Award at GLAM Evogen and Jeremy for winning an Honorable Mention Student Presentation Award at the American Ornithological Society conference!

May 2021
We had a lab get together to celebrate our many graduates (Lindsey, Michaela, Gladiana, Matthew, Ars, Tamanna, Ceylin) - we’re so proud of all that you’ve accomplished!

May 2021
Lindsey’s collaborative project on conservation genetics of Solomon endemic white-eyes was published in Emu - Austral Ornithology.

May 2021
Some more good lab news: Gladiana won the Grace McCormack Fund for Biology Prize, Jeremy received a Chapman research grant, and Felix was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship! Woo hoo congrats all!

April 2021
Congratulations to Jeremy for receiving an ASN Student Research Award and an AOS Student Research Award. Gladiana gave a fantastic talk and received a Deans’ Award at the UR Undergrad Research Expo! Also, huge congrats to Lindsey for passing her Master’s exam!

March 2021
Congratulations to Ceylin, Gladiana, and Matthew for getting into graduate school! Also, Swarthmore undergraduate Bailey Jones was awarded a Baltimore/Broad Summer Research Fellowship to work with us this summer.

February 2021
Congratulations to Felix for being selected as a finalist for the highly competitive Life Sciences Research Fellowship!

December 2020
A feature article about our collaborative Florida Scrub-Jay genetic rescue project made the cover of the Winter 2020 issue of Audubon.

October 2020
Undergrad Kristin Hardy and postdoc Elsie Shogren (co-advised by Al Uy) joined the team.

August 2020
Welcome to new postdoc Felix Beaudry, and congratulations to Jeremy for passing his quals!

July 2020
Everyone participated in the online Great Lakes Annual Meeting of Evolutionary Genetics (GLAM-Evogen). Lindsey drew the beautiful conference logo, and Gladiana won the Best Poster Award!

June 2020
Nancy gave a talk in the Long Term Animal Research seminar series. You can watch a recording of her seminar on Youtube.

May 2020
Congratulations to Michaela for winning the Grace McCormack Fund for Biology Prize and the University of Rochester’s Merle Spurrier Award! We’re so proud of our many seniors (Tamanna, Michaela, Jonathan, Matthew, Bo) - congratulations all for graduating! Also, graduate student Lindsey has officially joined the lab.

March 2020
Lindsey found her first scrub-jay nest in the field.

November 2019
We had a double lab comedy weekend this month. Nancy was a guest on the show Stand Up Science and Jeremy had an improv show.

October 2019
Our lab made an interactive game about relatedness for outreach. Also, meet Archie, the new Chen lab mascot.

September 2019
Check out this nice photo essay of our work at Archbold and SSE’s New Faculty Profile of Nancy.

August 2019
Martha is off to vet school at Cornell, and undergrad Michaela Burrell joined the team.

July 2019
We celebrated our one year anniversary with a lab warming party full of scrub-jays.

July 2019
Our work was featured in this nice article on the small populations symposium at the Evolution conference. You can watch Nancy’s talk here.

July 2019
Our NIH R35 grant was recommended for funding!!! And Nancy was elected an Elective Member of the American Ornithology Society. Hurray!

May 2019
Congratulations to Tiffany for graduating and winning the Grace McCormack Fund for Biology Prize! Also, welcome summer undergrads Jonathan Chow, Syed Ars Ghani, Gladiana Spitz, and Bo Zhou.

April 2019
Graduate student Jeremy has officially joined the lab, and undergrad Syed Ars Ghani was awarded a Discover Grant to do research in the lab this summer!

March 2019
Congrats to Lindsey for getting into grad school!

February 2019
Nancy was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, and Tiffany was named a Fulbright semifinalist. Hurray!

February 2019
First ever lab meeting! Also, welcome rotation grad students Rose Driscoll and Jeremy Summers.

January 2019
The Chen lab is growing! Intern Martha Hoffman, lab tech Lindsey Perrin, and undergrads Tiffany Dias and Matthew Le have joined the team.

January 2019
Read a nice commentary on our gene-dropping paper here.

December 2018
Our paper on using pedigrees to understand allele frequency dynamics is now out in PNAS!

September 2018
Welcome Tamanna! First person to join the Chen lab is undergrad Tamanna Bhatia.

July 2018
Made it to Rochester! The Chen Lab is officially open.

March 2018
Audubon writes a profile of Nancy: Why Nancy Chen Is Mapping the Family Tree of Florida Scrub-Jays