Together with our collaborators, Dr. Scott Taylor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Dr. Tim Roth at Franklin & Marshall College, we worked with the awesome folks at Galactic Polymath to develop a set of lesson plans about hybridization, evolution, and climate change! The lessons are targeted towards high school science classes, and should be great fun while also teaching important concepts!

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We are very proud to announce that Alex successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on February 27, 2020. His dissertation was entitled “The Chemical Ecology of a Hybridizing Chickadee System: Olfaction and Reproductive Isolation.” Way to go, Alex!

Congratulatory artwork by Joan Spinelli.

Rice lab graduate students, past and present (and their adviser). (L to R) Michael McQuillan, Alex Huynh, Joan Spinelli, Amber Rice.

Alex and his dissertation committee. (L to R) Amber Rice, Danielle Whittaker (Michigan State University), Alex, Greg Lang, and Michael Layden.

Visual and auditory signals have been well studied in songbirds and often play important roles in premating reproductive isolation, but olfaction has received much less attention. Alex’s new paper shows that olfactory cues also have the potential to act in premating reproductive isolation. He found that preen oils from black-capped and Carolina chickadees have different chemical profiles, and that males and females of both species prefer to associate with odors from individuals of their own species. Check out his paper here!

Congratulations, Alex! Alex was awarded a Gordon C. Thorne Fellowship from the Department of Biological Sciences in recognition of his research accomplishments. This fellowship will allow Alex to take some longer sampling trips for the last aim of his thesis investigating olfactory communication as a component of reproductive isolation. It is much appreciated. Way to go, Alex!

We are all so excited for Mike as he moves on to a postdoc position with Dr. Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania! Mike’s new position started July 2. He will be working with Dr. Tishkoff’s group on human evolutionary genomics. What a fantastic opportunity! We can’t wait to hear more about what he learns and the projects he works on. Congratulations and best wishes, Mike!

Our new paper on hybrid learning and memory is now available as an Accepted Article in Evolution. Congratulations to Mike as the first author, and to Alex who contributed supporting analyses! The study was covered by a nice article in Audubon as well, which you can access here.

Check out Mike’s manuscript on learning and memory deficiencies in hybrid chickadees! It’s available here on the Biology preprint server, bioRxiv. Great job, Mike!

Way to go, Joanna! We’re so proud of you!

Joanna was a fierce Kubb competitor while in the Rice Lab.

Alex received a Lehigh College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Student Research Grant to support his dissertation research on the role of olfactory communication in hybridization. Congratulations, Alex!!!