Margaret Rubega leads the lab by keeping the focus on mechanism — a correlation alone is generally not an answer to a question, in her book. She began her career studying terns, as part of the Great Gull Island Project; she has gone on to study an array of avian species in the Bering Sea, the Antarctic Peninsula, and North America. So far, despite staying out of the tropics, she’s had gut parasites 3 times, which might have something to do with her over-riding interest, in both research and life, in feeding. Her CV is here.
Graduate Students
Holly Brown is a Ph.D. student, studying how herons and egrets overcome the visual problems associated with hunting through the air/water boundary.
Kevin R. Burgio is a Ph.D. student, studying the mechanisms shaping the distribution of two North American parrot species: the native, extinct Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), and the Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus), an invader from South America that began colonizing the United States in the 1960s.
Undergraduates
Kali Block is an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major, conducting a Sigma Xi-funded independent study project on whether North American populations of Monk Parakeets, an invasive species that has established breeding populations with apparent ease outside its home range, are undergoing morphological evolution in accordance with ecogreographical “rules”, such as Bergmann’s Rule. Kali is also a certified wildlife rehabilitator through the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council.
Collaborators
Lab Survivors: Graduated and Gone on to Other Pastures
Nancy LaFleur
Erin King
Kelly Tardiff
Academic Ancestors: Rubega’s Advisors and Mentors