2023 AOS Early Professional Awards to Glaucia Del-Rio, Carrie Branch, and Sara Lipshutz

Glaucia Del-Rio Carrie Branch Sara Lipshutz The American Ornithological Society (AOS) is pleased to announce Glaucia Del-Rio, Carrie Branch, and Sara Lipshutz as the 2023 recipients of the society’s Early Professional Awards, the James G. Cooper Early Professional Award and the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award. The James G. Cooper Early Professional Award and the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award are presented annually to recognize outstanding and promising work by researchers early in their careers. The 2023 James G. Cooper Early Professional Award is presented to Dr. Glaucia Del-Rio. Dr. Del-Rio currently works as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and at the Simões-Costa Lab at the Harvard Medical School, investigating how postzygotic isolation mechanisms might contribute to the formation of the remarkable avian diversity in Amazonia. Upon completion of her postdoc, she will fulfill her dream and become the curator of birds and an assistant professor at the Florida Museum of Natural History, starting in January 2024. She was born in Parque São Lucas, in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil. As an undergraduate student at the University of São Paulo, she became an intern at the Museum of Zoology of University of São Paulo in 2008. In 2015, she left Brazil to pursue a Ph.D. at Louisiana State University, where she followed her greatest passion, speciation processes in Amazonian birds. Her research was a deep dive into the genomic mechanisms associated with reproductive barriers in the Rhegmatorhina hoffmannsi X R. berlepschi hybrid zone. To develop this project, she joined and led ­several expeditions to Amazonia to collect specimens and DNA samples for museum collections. This effort included the Emilie Snethlage Expedition, for which she gathered a team of nine women to sample a remote area in Amazonia and to raise awareness about gender disparity in field ornithology. Dr. Del-Rio delivered a plenary address entitled “Insights into the speciation process from the most non-model organism ever” at the AOS & SCO–SOC 2023 Conference that was held in London, Ontario, Canada, in August 2023. Two 2023 Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Awards are presented this year; one to Carrie Branch and the other to Sara Lipshutz. Dr. Carrie Branch is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario (Western University) who is interested in the evolution of communication and cognition in North American chickadees. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada Reno (2018), Branch was awarded an Edward W. Rose Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and received an inaugural AOS Kessel Research Fellowship in 2020 to support her work on spatial cognition and female mate choice in mountain chickadees. She has since served on selection committees for both the Kessel and Rose fellowships. In ­collaboration with talented scientists, Branch has made several important contributions to the field of ornithology and animal behavior, garnering interest from national and international news media, including Science Magazine, Living Bird Magazine, and BBC One. Most recently, Branch and colleagues have shown that natural ­selection acts on the spatial cognitive abilities of food-caching birds—a long-hypothesized assumption that has historically been difficult to show in the wild. Branch is a productive scientist, having published 40 articles in top journals in her field, including Ornithology, Current Biology, Proceedings B, and Animal Behaviour. She is also committed to mentoring students and has involved numerous undergraduate students in her ­research program (24 total), many of whom have received research grants (five to date) and earned authorship on publications (five to date). She is committed to creating an inclusive classroom and fostering curiosity in the courses she teaches, including Animal Behaviour and Animal Communication. Since beginning her tenure at Western University in July 2022, she has received two research awards, including a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant and a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to establish the Laboratory for Integrative Studies of Avian Communication at Western’s Advanced Facility for Avian Research. Branch was elected as an AOS Elective Member in 2020. Dr. Branch delivered a plenary address entitled “Sexual selection, female choice, and cognitive adaptation in a food-caching bird” at the AOS & SCO–SOC 2023 Conference that was held in London, Ontario, Canada, in August 2023. Dr. Sara Lipshutz is currently an assistant professor at Loyola University in Chicago and a Research Associate in Life Sciences at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Dr. Lipshutz was previously a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow in biology at Indiana University Bloomington and NSF graduate research fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Tulane University. Dr. Lipshutz studies the evolution of behavior across weird and wonderfully diverse species of birds, focusing on the causes and consequences of female competition. This work bridges “muddy boots” experimental fieldwork with a variety of molecular and computational approaches in genomics, neuroscience, and endocrinology. She has been awarded the Mark E. Hauber Outstanding Talk on Animal Behavior Award and Neotropical Ornithology Student Presentation Award from the AOS and North American Ornithological Conference, respectively. In 2015, she was the recipient of the AOS Alexander Wetmore Memorial Student Research Award. Lipshutz delivered a plenary address entitled “Fighting for fitness: integrating behavioral, hormonal, and genomic perspectives on the evolution of female competition” at the AOS & SCO–SOC 2023 Conference in London, Ontario, Canada, that was held in August 2023. In addition to presenting plenary talks at this year’s annual meeting, awardees received a cash prize and a framed certificate. In recognition of their outstanding work in the early years of their careers, AOS is pleased to recognize Glaucia Del-Rio, Carrie Branch, and Sara Lipshutz with this year’s Early Professional Awards.

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