January 2017 New paper by Sara Lipshutz, Isaac Overcast and collaborators Elizabeth Derryberry and Rob Brumfield in Molecular Ecology “Behavioral response to song and genetic divergence in two subspecies of white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys)“
October 2016 New paper: Joint Burbrink/BrianSmith/Hicker-lab effort “Asynchronous demographic responses to Pleistocene climate change in Eastern Nearctic vertebrates” Ecology Letters
October 2016 Welcome visiting PhD student Natali Hurtado Miranda who is visiting from the lab of Guillermo D’Elía at Universidad Austral de Chile. Natali is investigating the role of the Andean rivers in the speciation of sigmodontine rodents.
October 2016 Ed Myer’s new paper (first joint Burbrink/Hicker-lab effort): “Asynchronous diversification of snakes in the North American warm deserts” Journal of Biogeography
October 2016 Inaugural Munshi-South/Hickerson joint lab meeting at the Fordham field station. Talks, BBQ, & a mushroom hunt
September 2016 Champak’s ABLE preprint on Bioarxiv (flexible popgen/phylogeographic inference from partial or whole genomes with linkage information retained). “Approximate Likelihood Inference of Complex Population Histories and Recombination from Multiple Genomes”
August 2016 End of another era! A heartfelt Korean BBQ farewell feast for Roberta Damasceno and Tyler Joseph. Roberta returns to the University of São Paulo, Brazil, while Tyler starts his PhD adventure at Columbia (a few blocks away).
August 2016 One day “jam session” with the partial lab of Scott Edwards. List of talks here
July 2016 New paper by Ivan Prates et al. in PNAS (a big joint effort by the Carnaval and Hickerson labs). “Inferring responses to climate dynamics from historical demography in neotropical forest lizards“. CCNY press release here
July 2016 Welcome to the lab Gregory Thom who is a visiting PhD student from Dr. Cristina Miyaki’s lab at University of São Paulo, Brazil. Greg will be with the lab for a year.
June 2016 Lab alum John Robinson (Postdoc 2013-2014) just stated a faculty position as assistant professor at Michigan State University
May 2016 New paper by undergraduate Tyler Joseph! “Demographic inference under a spatially continuous coalescent model” Heredity
April 2016 New paper by Stephen Harris and several of us in the lab “Urbanization shapes the demographic history of a native rodent (the white-footed mouse, Peromyscus leucopus) in New York City” Biology Letters. Covered in the LA TIMES
March 2016 A huge congratulations for undergraduate Tyler Joseph! Tyler has decided to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University with Itsik Pe’er and Yaniv Erlich
January 2016 New paper by the Carnaval, Franks and Hickerson labs. Brown et al. “Predicting the genetic consequences of future climate change: The power of coupling spatial demography, the coalescent, and historical landscape changes” American Journal of Botany
December 2015 Two new pre-prints by Stephen Harris written up in the Molecular Ecologist (Country mouse, city mouse). The second one involved several people in the lab.
November 2015 New paper by Alexander (“Xander”) Xue “The aggregate site frequency spectrum (aSFS) for comparative population genomic inference” in Molecular Ecology
October 2015 Welcome visiting PhD student Sara Lipshutz! Sara is visiting from the Derryberry lab at Tulane is here working on inference of the demographic history of white-crowned sparrows subspecies along the west coast of the US.
September 2015 To send Diego off (and welcome in Roberta), we had a fantastic weekend retreat/Lab BBQ/Bonfire/Mushroom hunt. Roberta finds a ~5 lb Hericium (Coral’s Tooth) which we all cooked and ate immediately.
September 2015 New paper by Terry Demos “Comparative population genomics of small mammals support Eastern Afromontane population persistence across a climatic gradient and Quaternary paleoenvironmental changes” in PLoS One
September 2015 New paper by Diego Alvarado “Spatially explicit summary statistics for historical population genetic inference” in Methods in Ecology and Evolution
September 2015 Welcome Roberta Damasceno!! new visiting postdoctoral scholar from the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil). Roberta will be focusing on hybridization and mechanisms of reproductive isolation in lizards from the Brazilian Atlantic Forests
August 2015 Congratulations to lab alum Katriina Ilves!! Katriina starts new tenure-track faculty job at nearby Pace University
July 2015 Xander Xue and Diego Alvarado give talks at SSE (Guarujá, Brazil). Check out Diego in action here posted by the Molecular Ecologist
June 2015 Lab alum Katriina Ilves now assistant professor at Pace University!!!
April 2015 Isaac Overcast gets three travel awards: 1.) the Brazil SSE 2015 conference; 2.) the 2015 SSB standalone meeting at the University of Michigan; and one for 3.) the 2015 SISG at the University of Washington, Seattle
March 2015 Isaac Overcast gives talk “Patterns of Trance across the Tree of Life” at the CUNY Conference on Trance
January 2015 Successful lab road trip to Louisiana visiting the Gilchrist, Derryberry, Blum, Richards-Zawacki, Lozier, Esselstyn, Brown and Rick Miller labs
January 2015 New paper by J.T.Boehm – Population Genomics Reveals Seahorses (Hippocampus erectus) of the Western Mid-Atlantic Coast to Be Residents Rather than Vagrants
December 2014 Another new paper in BMC Evolutionary Bio! Skippered by Capt John Rrrrobinson and co-authored by Alec Coffman and Ryan Gutenkunst. “Sampling strategies for frequency spectrum-based population genomic inference”
November 2014 Welcome to the lab! New postdoctoral researcher Champak Reddy. Champak received his PhD from the Université Montpellier II, Montpellier, France and comes directly from the research group of Raphael Leblois at Centre de Biologie pour la Gestion des Populations in Montpellier, France.
October 2014 Welcome to the lab! New doctoral student Isaac Overcast
September 2014 New paper with Brian Smith, Robb Brumfield and many other great folks – “The Drivers of Tropical Speciation”
August 2014 Our new paper in Molecular Ecology skippered by Capt John Rrrrrobinson – “ABC inference of multi-population divergence with admixture from un-phased population genomic data”
July 2014 A fond farewell to the legendary Terry Demos! Terry has now begun a postdoc position at LSU with Jake Esselstyn
June 2014 Our new paper in MBE by Yvonne Chan! – “Detecting concerted demographic response across community assemblages using hierarchical approximate Bayesian computation”
April 2014 Congratulations Tyler Joseph on acceptance into CCNY’s Summer 2014 NSF-REU program!
April 2014 Congratulations Dr. Terrence Demos! Successfully defended!
April 2014 NYC Student Ancestry Result Event at the AMNH. Great fun had by all!
April 2014 The NY Daily News article on our NYC Student Ancestry Project
April 2014 Welcome to the lab Cécile Gracianne (visiting PhD student from University of Rennes, France)
March 2014 Welcome Tyler Joseph to the lab! Tyler is an undergraduate majoring in mathematics (and has a degree in music).
February 2014 First Atlantic Forest-Biota project workshop in São Paulo is a huge success – Project Website is launched
February 2014 Our NYC Student Ancestry Project finally launched! We thank everyone who helped and especially the folks at the AMNH and the National Geographic Genographic Project for joining us for this public program. Some press about the cheek swabbing event that involved roughly 200 students from 7 NYC area colleges can be found here, here and here.
December 2013 After a great year in the lab, John Rrrr Robinson has moved on to a permanent position as a Research Scientist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (Population Genetics Division). We will all miss him and wish him well! John will be running his own research lab focusing on the the population genetics of freshwater fishes and invertebrates of the North American Southeast. Look out for his papers in the near future (2 now in review) and what an outstanding going away feast we gave him. Going away party for John Rrrr Robinson (now a Research Scientist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources Population Genetics Division). The Hicker-lab yet again getting stuffed in the east village.
October 2013 Two new papers by Terry Demos – “Uncovering cryptic diversity and refugial persistence among small mammal lineages across the Eastern Afromontane biodiversity hotspot” (in press; Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution) and “Integrative taxonomy of the Hylomyscus denniae and H. anselli groups (Rodentia: Muridae) and description of a new species from western Kenya” (Journal of Mammalogy; in press).
September 2013 The Carnaval, McDonald, Michelangeli, Thomas and Hickerson labs are awarded a 5 year NSF/NASA Dimension of Biodiversity (DoB) grant: “Dimensions US-BIOTA-São Paulo: A multidisciplinary framework for biodiversity prediction in the Brazilian Atlantic forest hotspot.” Led by Ana Carnaval, the American project team of five PI’s (from CCNY and the New York Botanical Garden) will be collaborating with the FAPESP-funded Brazilian project team of three PI’s led by Cristina Miyaki. The Brazilian team includes Miyaki, Pinto-da-Rocha, and Cruz, all from the University of São Paulo.
August 2013 Welcome Diego Alvarado Serrano to the lab! Diego received his PhD from the U. of Michigan with Lacey Knowles and is now a postdoctoral researcher
June 2013 Hickerlab attends SSMPG 2013 workshop (Software and Statistical Methods for Population Genetics) in Aussois, France
May 2013 New paper by JT Boehm – “Marine dispersal and barriers drive Atlantic seahorse diversification” (Journal of Biogeography; in press)
April 2013 Welcome Ana Christina Fazza to the lab! As part of Ana’s PhD from the Universidade de São Paulo (with Cristina Miyaki), she will spend a year with us to develop historical demographic models for the Atlantic forest avian assemblage of Brazil
March 2013 Hickerson lab is awarded NSF’s CAREER grant DEB 1253710: “Dynamic models of isolation and admixture for community-scale population genomic inference”
February 2013 New paper by John Robinson – “Approximate Bayesian estimation of extinction rate in the Finnish Daphnia magna metapopulation” (Molecular Ecology)
December 2012 Welcome John Robinson to the lab! John R received his PhD from the U. of Georgia with John Wares and is now a postdoctoral researcher