About

I am an Associate Curator in the Department of Zoology, and Head of the Field Museum's Bird Division. I study the systematics and evolution of birds. What I do is use DNA sequences, morphology, and behavior to reconstruct how populations and species are related to one another—the tree of life. I’m interested in the same things you are interested in with respect to your own family tree. You might ask yourself why you look the way you do, behave the way you do, where your family traces its roots to. I am interested in these exact same things, only in birds.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Sociology
• Genetics
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Computational biology
• Evolutionary biology
• Engineering
• Paleontology
• Bioinformatics
• Zoology
• Data science
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Specimen collection is essential for modern science

  PLoS Biology · 2023 · 67 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Social Science
  • Biology

  Natural history museums are vital repositories of specimens, samples and data that inform about the natural world; this Formal Comment revisits a Perspective that advocated for the adoption of compassionate collection practices, querying whether it will ever be possible to completely do away with whole animal specimen collection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contrasting drivers of diversity in hosts and parasites across the tropical Andes

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 48 citations

  • Ecology
  • Biology

  Geographic turnover in community composition is created and maintained by eco-evolutionary forces that limit the ranges of species. One such force may be antagonistic interactions among hosts and parasites, but its general importance is unknown. Understanding the processes that underpin turnover requires distinguishing the contributions of key abiotic and biotic drivers over a range of spatial and temporal scales. Here, we address these challenges using flexible, nonlinear models to identify the factors that underlie richness (alpha diversity) and turnover (beta diversity) patterns of interacting host and parasite communities in a global biodiversity hot spot. We sampled 18 communities in the Peruvian Andes, encompassing ∼1,350 bird species and ∼400 hemosporidian parasite lineages, and spanning broad ranges of elevation, climate, primary productivity, and species richness. Turnover in both parasite and host communities was most strongly predicted by variation in precipitation, but secondary predictors differed between parasites and hosts, and between contemporary and phylogenetic timescales. Host communities shaped parasite diversity patterns, but there was little evidence for reciprocal effects. The results for parasite communities contradicted the prevailing view that biotic interactions filter communities at local scales while environmental filtering and dispersal barriers shape regional communities. Rather, subtle differences in precipitation had strong, fine-scale effects on parasite turnover while host-community effects only manifested at broad scales. We used these models to map bird and parasite turnover onto the ecological gradients of the Andean landscape, illustrating beta-diversity hot spots and their mechanistic underpinnings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comparative Analyses of Vertebrate Gut Microbiomes Reveal Convergence between Birds and Bats

  mBio · 2020 · 520 citations

  • Biology
  • Evolutionary biology
  • Zoology

  In this comprehensive survey of microbiomes of >900 species, including 315 mammals and 491 birds, we find a striking convergence of the microbiomes of birds and animals that fly. In nonflying mammals, diet and short-term evolutionary relatedness drive the microbiome, and many microbial species are specific to a particular kind of mammal, but flying mammals and birds break this pattern with many microbes shared across different species, with little correlation either with diet or with relatedness of the hosts. This finding suggests that adaptation to flight breaks long-held relationships between hosts and their microbes.

  DOI

• Dense sampling of bird diversity increases power of comparative genomics

  Nature · 2020 · 535 citations

  • Biology
  • Evolutionary biology
  • Computational biology

  , and captures only a fraction of the genomic diversity. Here we report a substantial step towards the dense representation of avian phylogenetic and molecular diversity, by analysing 363 genomes from 92.4% of bird families-including 267 newly sequenced genomes produced for phase II of the Bird 10,000 Genomes (B10K) Project. We use this comparative genome dataset in combination with a pipeline that leverages a reference-free whole-genome alignment to identify orthologous regions in greater numbers than has previously been possible and to recognize genomic novelties in particular bird lineages. The densely sampled alignment provides a single-base-pair map of selection, has more than doubled the fraction of bases that are confidently predicted to be under conservation and reveals extensive patterns of weak selection in predominantly non-coding DNA. Our results demonstrate that increasing the diversity of genomes used in comparative studies can reveal more shared and lineage-specific variation, and improve the investigation of genomic characteristics. We anticipate that this genomic resource will offer new perspectives on evolutionary processes in cross-species comparative analyses and assist in efforts to conserve species.

  DOI

Recent grants

• ATOL: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH Early Bird: A Collaborative Project to Resolve the Deep Nodes of Avian Phylogeny

  NSF · $901k · 2002–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Rauri C. K. Bowie

  Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

  96 shared

• Michael J. Braun

  University of Maryland, College Park

  84 shared

• Tamaki Yuri

  The Ohio State University

  78 shared

• Frederick H. Sheldon

  Louisiana State University

  78 shared

• Christopher C. Witt

  University of New Mexico

  77 shared

• Kin-Lan Han

  University of Florida

  77 shared

• Sushma Reddy

  UPMC Central Pa

  76 shared

• Christopher J. Huddleston

  Smithsonian Institution

  73 shared

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Everett E. Vokesh-185
• Ian Fosterh-150
• Jack W. Szostakh-142
• Jean Decetyh-142
• Graeme Bellh-141