Welcome to our archived news section.
June 2011: Sandra Bouwhuis has received a 2-yr Rubicon post-doc fellowship to work in the EGI on determinants of mortality in birds.
June 2011: Juan-Carlos Gonzalez won the Outstanding Young Scientist Award for Zoology for 2011, National Academy of Science and Technology, Philippines
June 2011: Chris Trisos was awarded a Wingate Scholarship to support his doctoral research
June 2011: Congratulations to Caroline Isakkson who has been appointed to a 4-yr tenure track position at Lund University, Sweden
May 2011: The 65th tit season winds down, marked with with the traditional group photo in Wytham. Over 1400 pairs bred: blue tits showed a strong increase (31%) on 2010, whereas numbers of breeding great tits fell by 30%.
May 2011: EGI researchers began the annual population monitoring of swifts in the University Museum tower. Around 60 pairs breed each year, and can be followed on the Museum's webcam. For a diary of tower events, click here.
April 2011: An EGI ringing trip to Portland Bill was rewarded with a nice selection of newly arrived migrants and a record-breaking up-channel passage of Bar-tailed Godwits (photos).
April 2011: A new European consortium (IDEAL) involving Tobias Uller has been awarded 12M Euros for a five-year project investigating developmental determinants of ageing and longevity
Mar 2011: We welcome Marie Pointer, Alex Pigot, Vinod Saranathan and Oscar Vedder as postdocs, funded by the ERC, the John Fell Fund, a Newton Fellowship, and the Dutch Science Research Council respectively.
Feb 2011: Judith Mank has been awarded funding to organise a NESCENT working group on the evolution of sex chromosomes in 2011-12.
Jan 2011: John Quinn and Tobias Uller have each been awarded NERC grants to work on evolutionary ecology of learning and epigenetics of developmental plasticity respectively.
Jan 2011: We welcome Colin Garroway, Alex Kirschel & Erin O'Brien as postdoctoral researchers, funded by the ERC, Marie Curie fellowship and NSERC fellowship, respectively.
Jan 2011: A DPhil studentship is available to study "Admixture, genetic diversity and the evolutionary dynamics of colonization", under the supervision of Tobias Uller and Judith Mank. For further particulars, click here.
Dec 2010: Joe Tobias has been awarded a John Fell Fund grant to study ecological niche partitioning and species richness in birds.
Nov 2010: Tobias Uller has been awarded a grant by the National Geographic Society to study the evolutionary ecology of introduced lizards.
Nov 2010: We welcome Marie-Curie Research Fellow, Dr Adele Mennerat; NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Jen Perry; and Postdoctoral Research Associate, Stephen Georgiou.
Oct 2010: We welcome six DPhil students: Chris Cooney, Antica Culina, Damien Farine, Grant McDonald, Brecht Verhelst and Alison Wright; three research assistants: Ross Crates, Lindall Kidd and Nicole Milligan; and two visitors: Lucy Aplin and Terezia Horvathova.
Sep 2010: Another successful EGI trip to Icklesham with some high-quality migrant birds trapped and ringed. Photos here.
Sep 2010: Caroline Isaksson has been awarded a grant by the Elizabeth Hannah Jenkinson Fund for a project on maternal effects and offspring nutrition.
Aug 2010: We welcome Camilla Hinde, who joins the EGI as a Postdoctoral Researcher to work with Ben Sheldon investigating social networks in great tits.
Aug 2010: Charlie Cornwallis has been awarded a three-year stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship from Queen's College, Oxford.
July 2010: The David Lack Centenary Symposium and the Hole Nesting Birds Conference, both hosted by the EGI, were a great success. Many thanks to all who attended.
July 2010: Stu Wigby has been awarded a Wellcome Value in People (VIP) Award for 9 months to continue his research at the EGI.
June 2010: Judith Mank has been awarded a € 1.35M five-year grant from the ERC to study the relationship between sexual selection and gene expression in birds.
June 2010: The end of the tit field season was marked with the traditional group photo in Wytham. High recruitment rates from an excellent breeding season in 2009 contributed to increases in the population size of great tits by 16% to 630 pairs and of blue tits by 22% to 597 pairs; early broods had low success, but late-hatched broods did well.
June 2010: Andy Gosler appeared on Springwatch, BBC2, to discuss the EGI's long-term studies of tit populations in the context of climate change. See clip
May 2010: Chris Perrins and Ben Sheldon participated in the centenary commemoration of the Grey-Roosevelt walk in Hampshire, together with representatives of the Grey and Roosevelt families and major conservation organisations. For further details click here
May 2010: Tobias Uller has been awarded an Early Career Project Grant from the BES to study admixture and genetic diversity in introduced wall lizard populations.
May 2010: Postdoctoral and Graduate Research Assistant positions available to study Evolutionary Social Ecology in wild birds. For details, click here (PDRA) or here (GRA).
Apr 2010: Postdoctoral Research Associate position available. For details, click here or visit the Zoology Department website.
Apr 2010: We welcome Nicole Milligan as Research Assistant working on Ben Sheldon's ERC grant.
Apr 2010: Erin O'Brien and Jen Perry have been awarded NSERC postdocs to work at the EGI on dispersal and local adaptation and sexual conflict, respectively.
Jan 2010: We welcome Steve Larcombe as EGI/Tour du Valat research fellow, and Yannis Psorakis, who begins a DPhil, funded by Microsoft, jointly with Prof Steve Roberts and Ben Sheldon.
Jan 2010: Adele Mennerat has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to work in the EGI on social networks and disease in birds.
Jan 2010: Many thanks to all who attended the EGI conference from 6-8 Jan 2010, often battling through inclement weather to do so. For photos, click here...
Jan 2010: Tom Pizzari and co-investigators (Adrian Smith and David Richardson, UEA) were awarded a £500K NERC grant to study immunological female responses to sperm in fowl.
Dec 2009: Three DPhils are available: one on signal evolution and speciation, one on the evolutionary ecology of sexual networks, and one on the the evolution of female phenotypes. For details, click here...
Dec 2009: A number of positions are available: a 5 yr postdoc, and a 4-yr research assistant position, working on social networks in birds, and a 14 month postdoc working on ecology of avian malaria. In addition, we seek to hire some short-term field assistants for work on the breeding ecology of tits.
Dec 2009: The Wetland Trust has awarded the EGI a grant to support the first phase of research into avian community ecology on an elevational transect in the Peruvian Andes.
Dec 2009: Rebecca Dean has been awarded an ASAB Research Grant to collaborate with Judith Mank in developing molecular tools to study promiscuous behaviour in female birds.
Dec 2009: Marta Szulkin and Bernt-Erik Saether are organising in Copenhagen a seminar discussing the ecological impacts of climate change. Read more...
Nov 2009: Ben Sheldon has been awarded a €2.5M five-year grant from the ERC to study social networks and ecology in birds.
Oct 2009: We welcome new DPhil students: Ben Daly (diversity gradients in Andean birds), Rob Heathcote (evolutionary ecology of wall lizards), Cedric Tan (inbreeding and sexual competition in fowl), and Chris Trisos (community ecology in Neotropical birds). We also welcome Alison Jameson as RA on signal evolution studies.
Oct 2009: Nat Seddon took part in the NESCent working group on Sexual Selection as a Mechanism of Speciation; a further three meetings are planned for the next two years.
Sep 2009: The annual EGI trip to Icklesham was a great success, with over 2500 migrant and resident birds ringed over the weekend. See photos...
Sep 2009: We welcome Julie Morand-Ferron, who joins us as a Postdoctoral Researcher to work with John Quinn on learning and behavioural plasticity in great tits.
Sep 2009: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship available at the EGI for 2+ years (in association with Jesus College). Closing date: 8th Oct 2009. For details, click here.
Aug 2009: Joe Tobias has been awarded a Royal Society Research Grant to study song development in antbirds at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama.
July 2009: Congratulations to Nat Seddon on the award of a L'Oréal UK for Women in Science Fellowship.
June 2009: The 63rd tit field season drew to a close this week (traditional tree photo). Blue tit numbers were almost unchanged at 488 pairs (+1% on last year), but great tit numbers fell by 24% to 541 pairs. However, breeding success was excellent.
May 2009: Congratulations to Ashleigh Griffin, who has been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
Apr 2009: Julie Morand-Ferron has been awarded an NSERC (Canadian) fellowship to work with John Quinn on individual variation in learning ability in great tits from October 2009.
Apr 2009: Congratulations to Judith Mank who has been awarded the Dobzhansky Prize by the Society for the Study of Evolution. This prize is given annually "to recognize the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologist."
Mar 2009: A theme issue on the ecology and evolution of parental effects, edited by Tobias Uller and colleagues, is published online. Read issue | Front cover | Info
Feb 2009: We were deeply saddened by the death of David Snow, a former member of the EGI, and an eminent field ornithologist. Read a short tribute and an obituary.
Feb 2009: Welcome to Judith Mank who joins the EGI as a University Lecturer.
Feb 2009: Snowbound in Oxford! EGI members celebrate with a snowfight...
Dec 2008: Two studentships available to start Oct 2009: (1) "Phenotypic plasticity and the dynamics of sexual selection in novel environments"; (2) "A global analysis of birdsong to investigate the role of signal evolution in speciation". More details...
Dec 2008: Tobias Uller has been awarded the 2009 ASAB Christopher Barnard Award for Outstanding Contributions by a New Investigator.
Dec 2008: Stuart Wigby has been awarded an ASAB research grant to study sexual conflict in fruit flies.
Dec 2008: On Oxford University's Science Blog, Joe Tobias answers some questions about the European Robin - the quintessential Christmas icon
Dec 2008: In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, EGI researchers have shown that male junglefowl allocate more sperm to genetically compatible hens.
Nov 2008: Caroline Isaksson has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Fellowship plus a two year postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council to study causes and consequences of oxidative stress in great tits.
Oct 2008: Arie van Noordwijk is visting the EGI from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology till November 2008.
Oct 2008: Congratulations to Tom Pizzari who has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Zoology. The prizes are awarded for outstanding contributions from scientists whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise.
Oct 2008: We welcome Vince Devictor, who joins us as an EGI/Tour de Valat fellow to continue his studies of the effects of global changes on avian communities; Juan Carlos Gonzalez, who starts a DPhil on Philippine hornbills; and Ada Grabowska, who starts a DPhil investigating dispersal decisions in juvenile great tits.
Sep 2008: The EGI field trip to Icklesham took place on 19-21 Sep. Two early starts and some roost-netting resulted in a good range of migrant and resident birds being trapped and ringed. To see photos, click here.
Sep 2008: Tobias Uller published a review in TREE discussing the role of developmental plasticity in resolving parent-offspring conflict and adaptation to variable environments. To read paper, click here.
Sep 2008: The line-up for this term's seminar series has been finalized (click here).
Sep 2008: Bernt-Erik Sæther is visiting the EGI on sabbatical for this academic year.
Aug 2008: The proceedings from a conference, entitled 'Birds as predators and as prey' and edited by John Quinn, was published online.
Aug 2008: Marta Szulkin has been awarded a grant from the John Fell Fund for her research on "Avoiding ecological genetics pitfalls in studies of wild animal populations".
July 2008: Stuart Wigby has been awarded a Lloyds Tercentenary Fellowship (one of only two recipients) to study sexual conflict based at the EGI starting October 2008.
July 2008: Congratulations to Joanne Chapman who won the prize for the best talk at the annual Divisional Graduate Symposium.
July 2008: Congratulations to Ashleigh Griffin, currently visiting the EGI from Edinburgh, on the award of a L'Oréal Women in Science Fellowship - we know she's worth it.
July 2008: A little monitoring of traffic to this website has revealed that there were over 10,000 visits in the last five months. Click here to see a map of the 113 countries represented.
June 2008: Ben Sheldon talks about the Wytham long term tit studies on "Shared Earth" on BBC Radio 4. Click here to listen.
July 2008: Chris Perrins is interviewed for the BBC, talking about ongoing work fitting geolocators to Puffins breeding on Skomer, off the West coast of Wales.
June 2008: This year's tit field season - the 62nd - drew to a close with the traditional group photo in Wytham. Tit populations at Wytham and Bagley Woods, the EGI's two study sites, remain very high, with 483 pairs of blue tits and 712 pairs of great tits breeding in the two sites this year.
May 2008: Charlie Cornwallis and Tim Birkhead publish findings in Evolution that reveal males dynamically invest in sexual traits according to the intensity of pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection they face. To read paper, click here. To see front cover, click here.
May 2008: Francisco Garcia-Gonzalez has been awarded a 5-year advanced NERC fellowship to study sperm competition based at the EGI starting Feb 2009.
May 2008: Ben Sheldon and colleagues published a paper in Science dissecting the mechanisms that have enabled great tits in Wytham to track changing environments over nearly five decades. To read paper, click here. For full media coverage, click here.
May 2008: We welcome Adele Powell, who starts a DPhil on the migration and winter ecology of Eurasian woodcock.
Apr 2008: Hanne Løvlie was awarded an EPA Cephalosphorin Junior Research Fellowship from Linacre College
Apr 2008: Congratulations to Rebecca Dean who won the prize for best talk at the ASAB Easter conference in Edinburgh.
Apr 2008: Bee Biaw is visiting the EGI on an SCCS internship in March-April 2008. Bee works on on the effects of habitat fragmentation on the community and molecular ecology of small mammals in Kerangas forests in Borneo.
Mar 2008: A University Lectureship in Quantitative Evolutionary Ecology, in association with Wadham College is available (closing date: 4 April). For futher details, click here.
Jan 2008: Hanne Løvlie has been awarded funding from the Swedish Research Council for a postdoc on personalities and sexual selection.
Jan 2008: We welcome Olof Hellgren, who joins us on a Swedish Research Council funded postdoc to study the genetical ecology of innate immunity in birds, and Claire Salisbury, who starts a DPhil on speciation in Amazonian birds.
Jan 2008: Thanks to everyone for attending the 2008 EGI conference, especially those who came from abroad. For information on the 2008 programme click here.
Dec 2007: Four positions available: JRF (Jesus College) to be held jointly at the EGI and Tour du Valat in the Camargue; DPhil studying migration and winter ecology of the woodcock; RA to investigate the role of malaria infection in the dispersal and survival of blue and great tits; RA to develop a vocal dataset for suboscine birds.
Nov 2007: Ben Sheldon and Matt Wood were awarded a NERC grant to study avian malaria; and Nat Seddon and Joe Tobias were awarded a John Fell Fund grant to study signal evolution in suboscine birds.
Oct 2007: Nature News features Andrew Gosler and colleagues' research showing that egg patterning in birds eggs can indicate DDT contamination
Oct 2007: We are pleased to welcome Tobias Uller who joins us as a Departmental Lecturer in Animal Diversity and to continue his work on the evolutionary ecology of maternal effects and sex allocation; Ella Cole who begins a DPhil on problem-solving in birds; and Irem Sepil who begins a DPhil on the ecology of malaria in birds
Oct 2007: We are pleased to welcome Suzanne Alonzo, who visits us on sabbatical from Yale funded by a Royal Society Incoming Visting Fellowship
Aug 2007: Julie Collet has been awarded a Light Senior Scholarship from St. Catherine's College for her DPhil research on the reproductive biology of the fowl
Jul 2007: Many members of the EGI participated in a successful catch of 806 mute swans (see photos) at the biannual swan-upping at Abbotsbury
Jun 2007: John Quinn has been awarded a grant of £15,000 from The Royal Society to study individual variation in cognitive and personality traits in birds
Jun 2007: Together with collaborators at Edinburgh, Cambridge and Imperial, Ben Sheldon published a paper in Nature in June demonstrating sexually antagonistic genetic variation in red deer on Rum Listen to Nature podcast
Apr 2007: Nathalie Seddon and Joseph Tobias have been awarded grants to study the Amazonian dawn chorus (£25,000, British Ecological Society), and to establish an ornithological research programme at Los Amigos, Peru (£5,000, Amazon Conservation Association)
Apr 2007: Rebecca Dean and Tom Pizzari published a perspective piece in Science arguing that effects of male age and sperm ageing constitute an important but neglected component of sperm competition and sexual selection Read paper online
Mar 2007: Charlie Cornwallis has been awarded a grant of £15,000 from The Royal Society to study cooperation and spite in Reproductive strategies
Feb 2007: Marta Szulkin has been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship from Magdalen College for three years from October 2007
Jan 2007: Professor Lord Krebs has been appointed to the House of Lords as one of six new non-party peers
Thanks to everyone for attending the 2007 EGI conference, especially those who came from abroad: we hope you agree it was both great fun and a scientific success. We look forward to seeing you in 2008.
Congratulations to Claire Andrews and to Teddy Wilkin who passed their DPhil vivas in style in November 2006. Teddy has recently begun a NERC-funded-post-doc on dispersal mechanisms in the great tit.
THE EGI STUDENT CONFERENCE will be held at Oxford, 9-11 January 2007. Registration for the conference has now closed and there are no longer any talk slots available. However there may still be space to attend the conference and to present a poster, but please check with Claire Rowsell when she is back in the office in early January.
John Quinn has been appointed to the position of Departmental Lecturer in Behavioural Mechanisms and takes up the position in October 2006.
Farewell to Anne Charmantier who has just been awarded a permanent CNRS research fellowship at the University of Montpellier, France. Anne's presence will be sorely missed at the EGI and we wish her well.
Congratulations to Sarah Nachuha who has just passed her DPhil viva with minor corrections. Sarah's thesis concerns the ecology of wetland birds on rice paddies in Uganda and was examined by Will Cresswell from the University of St Andrews and Andy Gosler from the EGI.
Welcome to Amy Hinks, Julie Collett and Mark Baynes who all begin their DPhils October 2006, to Farah Ishtiaq and Miriam Liedvogel who bring their own Marie Curie Fellowshipsto the EGI. Congrats to Teddy Wilkin who takes up his first (NERC funded) post doc..
The Times reports on research by Andy Gosler at the EGI on the functional significance of speckling patterns on bird eggs