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Newsletter

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WORDS FROM THE CHAIR

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Welcome to the new NBB Newsletter. We have not published a newsletter since the summer of 2001, so there is a lot of news to report! The last four years have been a time of growth and change, which are essential for the health of an academic community.  Everywhere you look, you see changes that have made our department stronger and better.

Our faculty continues to change and grow, bringing in new ideas.  Tom Podleski retired in 2000 after 30 years of service to Cornell. He graciously agreed to return to teach his very popular course on “Neurodiseases Molecular Aspects” in both 2001 and 2002, and is now enjoying an active retirement of skiing and hiking near Taos, New Mexico.  Christiane Linster joined our faculty in 2000, and is in the midst of her tenure decision, after getting an enthusiastic vote of support from our faculty.  David McCobb and David Deitcher were both promoted to Associate Professor with indefinite tenure, while Kern Reeve has just been promoted to Full Professor. These promotions are rewards for very hard work and high achievement in their research and teaching.  Speaking of awards, there are several to brag about.  Ron Hoy was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2002; he is now receiving munificent funds to develop new teaching tools in neuroethology and neuroengineering.  He is the first HHMI appointee at Cornell, and we are very proud of Ron.  Tom and Maria Eisner were honored by the CALS Alumni Association with the “Outstanding Faculty/Staff Award”.  They have been a successful scientific team for a long time, producing many papers in Science, as well as Tom’s new book, “For the Love of Insects” which won the award for “Best Science Book of the Year” from the Independent Publisher Book Association.

We are also keeping up with the times in our course offerings.  Since 1997 we have stopped teaching 11 courses, many of them graduate seminars.  However, we have just completed a total revision of our curriculum, and by the end of next year we will have added 25 new courses.  Some of these represent popular areas that were not previously covered, such as neuropharmacology, chemical ecology and a lab in animal behavior.  Other courses are in areas that are just emerging at the forefront of neurobiology and behavior, such as “Genes and Behavior”, “Molecules Affecting Social Behavior and Emotion”, “Computational Neuroscience”, and “Human Sociobiology”.  This year, for the first time, we have hired a “Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow”, Pat Barclay, who will teach one course a year in human sociobiology and carry on his research with our world-famous behavior group.

Of course, our students keep changing every year.  We are both proud and sad to see our freshly minted Ph.D's leave the nest and strike off to the next stage of their careers.  But every fall a new group arrives to liven things up.  Last fall, we had the first departmental retreat in over 10 years. It was held out at Arnot Forest, a rustic woodsy retreat south of Ithaca.  We started out with a poster session, with every lab providing posters of their recent work.  Both the new students and all of us oldsters were excited to learn more details about what our colleagues are up to.  We also had a series of panel discussions on important future directions in neurobiology and behavior.  At the end, we had a session on how to make things better in the department. We got a lot of very constructive suggestions (the Newsletter being one of them) which have kept me busy all year.  We plan to continue the poster session on an annual basis from now on, and hopefully to have full-blown retreats more often than every 10 years.

As is described in this issue by Andrew Bass, we have also just begun a new interdepartmental Program in Neuroscience. This will hopefully draw together the faculty, grad students and postdocs from departments all over the Cornell campus to discuss how they can interact and collaborate to further neuroscience at Cornell.  The grad students have already set up a Neuroscience Club, with regular meetings over pizza and talks. The goal is to improve ties between neuroscience grad students and get them to think about collaborations that may not be apparent otherwise. I was honored to be the first speaker at the club last month.

A final change is that this is my farewell as Chair of the Department. Starting on July 1, Tom Seeley will become Chair for the next three years. Tom has been Associate Chair this year, and has learned the ropes so he should have a fairly seamless transition into the Chairmanship.

I hope those of you who are alumni will stop by when you visit Cornell; let us know in advance, and we can arrange a visit with your old professors and you can see the place again. I hope you will agree we are continuously changing for the better!

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NEW FACULTY

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The newest faculty member in NBB is Prof. Joseph Fetcho.  Joe moved with his laboratory to Cornell last August from SUNY Stony Brook.  Joe’s lab studies the molecular basis of behavior in the model organism, zebrafish.  The Fetcho lab has been a fantastic addition to NBB – with an amazing array of imaging equipment and a fun and interesting crew to match.

Joe’s interest in biology stems from an early fascination with animals.  His childhood home in Bethlehem, PA was filled with guinea pigs, salamanders, snakes, dogs, and cats.  From watching his pet snakes, Joe became fascinated by the question of how do snakes manage to move without limbs?  Joe pursued his interest in biology and snakes as an undergraduate at nearby Lehigh University and then attended University of Michigan graduate school.  Joe studied snake anatomy to understand the anatomical basis of snake movement.  By the end of graduate school, Joe realized the complexity of snake anatomy made understanding their movements an extremely challenging.  Joe decided to instead focus on the basis of movement in fish, a more tractable scientific system. 

Up to that time Joe had focused on anatomy but to in order to understand movement, he needed to add physiology to his scientific repertoire.  In 1984, he took the Neural Systems and Behavior at Woods Hole to learn electrophysiological techniques.  It was there on the Massachusetts coast that Joe met NBB’s own Ron Hoy, Ron Harris-Warrick, and Andrew Bass who were instructors in the course.  Joe took these new skills to his postdoctoral work in Don Faber’s lab at SUNY Buffalo where he studied the spinal cord circuits for movement in gold fish. 

Joe started his first faculty job at SUNY Stony Brook in 1990.  He initially continued his work on gold fish locomotion but he would soon switch to a new animal.  At the time, zebrafish was just emerging as a new vertebrate model organism.  Zebrafish have a rapid generation time making them suitable for genetics.  It is also possible to make stable transgenic lines in zebrafish.  But the major attraction of zebrafish for Joe was their transparency during development.  This property made them ideal for probing neural function using optical methods.  His lab took advantage of the transparency by laser ablating individual neurons to define the escape response circuit.  They also used Ca2+ sensitive fluorescent dyes and Ca2+ sensitive fluorescent proteins to literally watch which neurons and synapses were active during movements in live animals.  The ability to perform these experiments in behaving animals was a true breakthrough in connecting molecular events to animal behavior.  More recently, his lab demonstrated that CamKII, an important synaptic kinase, actually moves to sites of synaptic contact during stimulation in intact behaving animals.  Joe’s lab is currently using the next generation of optical methods to understand how the brain and spinal cord produce movements.

Previously, Fetcho was awarded a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1992-94), and more recently a Javits Neuroscience Investigator award (2002-09).

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PROGRAM IN NEUROSCIENCE

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The Program in Neuroscience aims to build a community of neuroscientists that reach out beyond the traditional academic boundaries to build and strengthen effective bridges between the biological and behavioral sciences, the physical sciences and engineering. With this goal in mind, an Executive Committee for a Program in Neuroscience was appointed by the Provost’s Office in 2002 and charged with overseeing the growth of this program along several fronts including the recruitment of faculty members.  This committee currently includes the following individuals that represent a number of departments and disciplines from across the Ithaca campus: Andrew Bass (committee chair and program director, Neurobiology and Behavior), Ronald Hoy (co-chair, Neurobiology and Behavior), Richard Cerione (Molecular Medicine & Chemistry and Chemical Biology), Barbara Finlay (Psychology & Neurobiology and Behavior), John Guckenheimer (Mathematics), Ronald Harris-Warrick (Neurobiology and Behavior), Michael Kotlikoff (Biomedical Sciences), Linda Nowak (Molecular Medicine), Watt Webb (Applied and Engineering Physics), and Mariana Wolfner (Molecular Biology and Genetics).

This past semester witnessed a very active time for the program. Three departments were engaged in searches for junior faculty that included an open position for a neuroscientist. All three departments have offered positions to candidates and negotiations are ongoing. This included the Departments of Psychology, Biomedical Sciences, and Molecular Biology and Genetics. With assistance from the Provost’s office, Andrew Bass assisted graduate students and postdoctoral associates (“postdocs”) in neuroscience from across the campus to begin to meet on a regular basis to discuss common interests. The graduate students have now organized themselves into a “club” and had a discussion with Professor Ron Harris-Warrick from Neurobiology and Behavior on April 25, 2005 on the topic of “Neural Basis of Motor Plasticity”. The postdocs sponsored Professor Watt Webb from Applied and Engineering Physics as a seminar speaker in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior seminar series. Professor Webb’s seminar was entitled: Current optical explorations of some neurodegenerative disease mechanisms. The postdocs then had a lunch with Professor Webb following his presentation.

The Provost’s office also approved two years of funding for a campus-wide Seminar Series in the Neurosciences. The first speaker in the series was co-sponsored with the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and was the Class of 1942 James B. Sumner lecture, presented on October 29, 2004 by Nobel Prize laureate Professor MacKinnon from the Rockefeller University. Professor Rod MacKinnon spoke on his award winning studies on the structure function organization of potassium channels.

The second speaker in the series, Dr. Karel Svoboda, is a Howard Hughes Investigator at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Svoboda, who received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell. A hallmark of brains is the ability of their neuronal circuits to re-wire during processes such as learning and memory. Dr. Svoboda has revealed the morphological and functional substrates underlying this rewiring by directly imaging the morphological changes that occur over time in individual neurons in intact brains. Dr. Svoboda presented his lecture entitled “Imaging Synaptic Plasticity” in April.

The Provost’s office provided financial support for the construction of a new user friendly website for the Program in Neuroscience. The website is currently being constructed, but can be accessed at: http://neuroscience.cornell.edu.

As we move forward into the next academic year, we look forward to our continuing efforts to form an interactive, interdisciplinary community of neuroscientists on the Ithaca campus.

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KUDOS

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Dr. Jon C. Glase to Retire after 31 Years
Dr. Jon Glase will retire at the end of the Spring 2005 semester, after 31 years as Sr. Lecturer and Director of the Introductory Biology Laboratory course (BioG 102-104).  Jon has received many awards and grants for his important innovations to the Introductory Biology laboratory courses.  The past several years, Jon has focused his attentions on developing a series of interactive online tutorials to aid students in understanding some of the more complex principles in intoductory biology.  These tutorials will provide a lasting benefit for our introductory biology students well into the future.  Please join us for a celebration on Monday, June 6, 2005 to honor Jon Glase for his dedicated service to the Department and Introductory Biology (2:00 pm in the Atrium of Corson-Mudd Hall, Cornell).

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RESEARCH NEWS

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GRADUATE STUDENTS:

Judith Scarl: Cockatoo Calls .
My research focuses on acoustic communication and mate choice in the galah, an Australian cockatoo.  When the males and females of a species differ in their morphology and behavior only slightly, what signals do individuals of that species use to make decisions regarding mate choice?  Galahs form socially monogamous pair bonds, males and females both invest heavily in raising offspring, yet these birds do not seem to produce any long-distance mate attraction signals.  Since galahs rely heavily on a rich vocal repetoire for communication, I predict that individuals may use subtle differences in vocalizations between males and females and among individuals to assess features of potential mates.

I conduct my fieldwork in a local nature reserve in Canberra, Australia.  In 2004, I wing-tagged much of the resident population of galahs and obtained repeated vocal recordings from these known individuals.  Although males and females produce the same types of calls, preliminary analyses of the contact calls of these individuals indicate both individual and sex differences in these vocalizations.  At the beginning of next season, I will complete a playback experiment to determine whether galahs respond differently to male and female contact calls.  I predict that if these contact calls are used to mediate mate attraction, an individual’s response to these playbacks will be highly dependent on the sex of the caller.

In addition to acoustic analyses and playback studies, I am monitoring nests and obtaining blood samples from parent galahs and their offspring; paternity analyses of these samples will indicate the rates of extra-pair fertilizations and will provide a rough index of male quality.  Next season, also, I will be performing spectral analysis on all adult trapped birds to determine whether galahs may be using subtle color dimorphisms as mate attraction signals.
J udith Scarl is a second-year graduate student working with Jack Bradbury.

Chris Wilson: Sex, Who Needs It?
I am at an early stage of my research into the enduring evolutionary mystery of the persistence of sex. Despite numerous empirical and countless theoretical treatments, we have yet to reach a satisfactory explanation for the energy and resources “wasted” producing males. The bdelloid rotifers are a unique system with respect to this problem. They have been confirmed through molecular methods as ancient asexuals, with no recombination for at least 60 million years. Any theory for the evolution of sex must also explain how the bdelloids uniquely avoid such a need, and thus the bdelloids may offer a critical test of sexuality hypotheses.

The Red Queen hypothesis proposes that pathogenic co-evolutionary arms races necessitate recombination, since parasites quickly become locally adapted to host resistance genotypes. Sex enhances the frequency-dependent response to parasitic selection pressure by maintaining genotypic diversity. Asexuals cannot ‘shuffle’ genotypes in this manner, and are predicted to lose coevolutionary races with parasites and go extinct. The Red Queen hypothesis would be supported by a finding that exempts the bdelloid rotifers alone from this prediction.

One possibility is that the bdelloids possess a parasite-free dispersal phase which allows them to escape their parasites in space and time rather than through sex. I am sampling bdelloids in the local area and attempting to model and measure dispersal parameters.  In the lab, I am culturing bdelloid rotifers and their major parasites and examining the physiological interactions between the two. This work will later be supported by revisiting and modifying existing models of bdelloid-parasite interaction. My hope is that these findings will either provide a new line of evidence in strong support of the Red Queen hypothesis, or deal it a substantial empirical blow. 
Chris Wilson is a second-year graduate student working with Kern Reeve and Paul Sherman.

Samuel M. Flaxman: Where to go?
All animals have to find critical resources (such as food) in order to survive and reproduce, but these resources are often distributed in a patchy manner in an animal's environment.  My research focuses on how and why animals choose particular patches of habitat: Why do we find animals where we find them?  Can we predict how animals of a given species should be distributed in time and space?  The answers to these questions are not only important for understanding the behavior of individual animals, but also for determining how that behavior impacts a species' population biology and the larger properties of the ecological community of which the species is a part.

This research involves both theoretical (mathematical) and experimental approaches to understanding habitat selection behavior and its consequences.  On the theoretical side, I use mathematical models to make predictions about where animals should choose to go in an environment, given that resources are patchily distributed.   These models view animals as rational consumers of a limiting resource, and make predictions based upon the assumption that consumers will seek to maximize their resource intake.

Experimentally, I test the predictions of these models in an empirical system comprising ladybird beetles ("ladybugs"), their aphid prey, and fava bean plants on which the aphids feed.  In this system, fava bean plants are the "resource" for the aphids, and the aphids in turn are the resource for the ladybird beetles.  In my laboratory, I create patches of habitat with varying amounts of resources by making clumps of variable numbers of fava bean plants inside experimental apparatuses.  I then add aphids and sometimes ladybugs, and make multiple observations over a number of days, recording how the animals are distributed amongst the patches of plants.  These experiments thus allow me to study habitat selection behavior and predator-prey interactions simultaneously.  Furthermore, by recording measurements on plant growth, I am able to study the direct and indirect effects of the aphids and beetles (respectively) on the plants, thereby placing the habitat selection behavior of individuals in a broader ecological context.  Data from these experiments are also used to test contrasting predictions of alternative mathematical models of habitat selection and to thus rarefy our understanding of the theoretical basis of these behaviors.
Sam Flaxman is a sixth year graduate student working with Paul Sherman and Kern Reeve.

Troy Murphy: Tantalizing Tails
I am interested in understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain elaborate plumage in both sexes.  Generally, when elaborate plumage is found in sexually dimorphic species, it is thought to be the product of sexual selection.  When found in both males and females, this presents a paradox because females generally do not compete for access to resources or mates.  Such elaborate, monomorphic characters may be products of mutual sexual selection acting equally on the sexes, or  they may be products of natural selection acting equally on the sexes.

Illustration by Benjamin Clock

For my dissertation research, I studied the function of elaborate male and female plumage in the Turquoise-browed Motmot.  Both sexes have strange tails, with large racketed tips that extend far below the body of the bird.  The elaborate tail is not sexually selected in both sexes, but rather, functions as a sexually selected character in only the males.  I have shown that males with more elaborate tails have fewer ectoparasites, have greater success at acquiring a mate, and have greater success at fledging young, but females show no such relationship between tail expression and condition or reproductive success.  Why then do the females have a long tail if they do not gain sexually selected benefits from maintaining the racketed-tail? The answer lies with the other, naturally selected, function of the tail.  Both sexes wag-display their tails in a left-right manner when they encounter predators, and the wag-display functions to deter predators from pursuit, or to warn conspecifics of danger. Because the tail is used by both sexes to communicate when predators are present, I propose that both males and females have been selected to maintain long tails, yet males are subject to the additional force of sexual selection, and this explains why male tails are about 10% longer than female tails.
Troy Murphy is a seventh-year graduate student working with Stephen Emlen and Paul Sherman.

Jay Mager: Loony Tunes
Over the past twelve years, I have researched the life history and breeding biology of the Common Loon (Gavia immer), a species of migratory waterbird that primarily breeds on freshwater lakes throughout Canada and into the lower forty-eight contiguous United States.  Since the early twentieth century, this charismatic species that has long symbolized the northern wilderness has suffered from the increasing degree of human disturbance and development of freshwater ecosystems.  This has prompted many state management groups to declare the species as either Endangered, Threatened, or a Species of Special Concern, and has inspired a number of biologists, including myself, to investigate how we can minimize our impact upon loon populations.  Such research has made me aware of how little we understand regarding the behavioral ecology of this species, and particularly our understanding of processes by which loons select and defend breeding territories.

After conducting behavioral research of loon parental effort both as an undergraduate and as a Master’s student, I came to Cornell with an interest in working with Dr. Charles Walcott, who shared my interest in learning more about the behavioral mechanisms by which loons select, establish, and defend breeding territories.  Charlie had been interested particularly in conducting research that investigated the possible function(s) of the yodel, a territorial vocalization that has been considered to be the ‘song’ of the Common Loon in that it is structurally complex and is given only my males during certain periods of the breeding season.  I have spent the past five summers working with a population of individually-banded Common Loons in northcentral Wisconsin investigating to examine what role the yodel plays in territory acquisition by elucidating what pieces of information males are revealing about themselves when they yodel.

The results from a number of observational and experimental studies I have conducted indicate that loons likely communicate information about their identity, their body size (which provides information about their relative fighting ability), and their ‘motivation’ or willingness to escalate a territorial contest within each yodel.  Additionally, I have found through a habitat-manipulation study that the use of nesting platforms to provide additional nesting habitat where adequate habitat already exists (a common management practice) may adversely affect loon populations by increasing the degree of intraspecific competition.  Such findings emphasize how important it is for us to better understand the behavioral ecology of this species if we are interested in protecting current loon populations.
Jay Mager is a sixth-year graduate student working with Charlie Walcott.

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POSTDOCS:

David McLean:

Despite the common use of neuroactive chemicals like serotonin and dopamine to activate spinal locomotor networks, we still know very little about the contribution of brain centers that naturally release these amines during locomotion.  The reason for this is primarily one of accessibility.  In mammals, aminergic populations that innervate spinal cord have relatively few neurons, which are buried deep in brain tissue.  This presents a formidable obstacle to current optical and electrical recording techniques.  While we await the appropriate technology, a reasonable alternative is to study aminergic systems in a simpler, more accessible model system.  I am using zebrafish (Danio rerio) to investigate the role of aminergic neurons during locomotion, because they are completely transparent at early developmental stages when they express a range of locomotor capabilities.  This means it is possible to label aminergic neurons with calcium-indicator dyes (either genetically or retrogradely) and optically monitor their activity patterns as the larvae are simultaneously run through their locomotor repertoire (e.g., swimming, struggling, escaping).  Targeted expression of fluorescent constructs also enables a description of the development and interactions of aminergic neurons in vivo.  Ultimately, ablation techniques will be used to remove aminergic neurons and observe the behavioral consequences.  I anticipate that these experiments will yield valuable information about homologous aminergic populations in mammals, where similar approaches are not yet feasible. 
David McLean is currently funded by an NIH NRSA award under the supervision of Prof. Joseph Fetcho.

Manuel Diaz-Rios:
Over a year ago, I changed my research focus from one central pattern generator (CPG) circuit (Feeding CPG of Aplysia californica) to another (Locomotion CPG of the mouse).  I am currently interested in understanding the role and the modulation of a group of spinal neurons known as the commissural interneurons.  This population of spinal cord interneurons is known to have axons that cross the midline and have been implicated in the maintenance of alternation between antagonistic muscle groups (flexors vs extensors) during locomotion (e.g. walking).  I am using the neonatal mouse preparation as my model system to study the basic physiological properties of the commissural interneurons using the whole cell patch clamp technique.  I am also working on how these basic physiological properties are modulated by locomotion-related neurotransmitters such as serotonin and I will be also looking at the specific ionic currents that could be underlying these neuron's firing properties.

I am also collaborating with the lab of Dr. Watt Webb (Dept. Physics and Applied Engineering) in trying to understand the importance of voltage-activated calcium channels before, during and after the induction of locomotion by the application of serotonin.  This study includes the use of two-photon microscopy coupled with the use of voltage sensitive calcium indicator dyes.  This should help us understand the importance and significance of calcium influx into commissural interneurons during locomotion.
Manuel Diaz-Rios is currently funded by an NIH NRSA award under the supervision of Prof. Ronald Harris-Warrick.

Matthew Kittelberger:

Broadly, I am interested in how brains produce behaviors appropriate to the constantly changing needs and environmental contexts of individual animals. More specifically, I have focused, both in my graduate studies and in my current post-doctoral work, on the motor production of vocal communication signals, and how both learning and neuro-modulatory influences can adaptively shape vocal output. I prefer to use a range of the techniques available in modern systems neuroscience, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology (both extra- and intra-cellular) to cell biology, to 1) elucidate the structural and functional properties of neural circuits involved in producing vocal signals and 2) determine how specific changes in these circuit properties relate to specific learned or neuromodulatory-induced changes in the behavioral output.

My current project is to characterize how the firing patterns of midbrain neurons may contribute to the initiation and patterning of the courtship vocalizations of the midshipman fish. The neuropeptide arginine-vasotocin (AVT) is known to modulate reproductive and social behaviors in a wide range of animals and can shape the vocal-motor output in these fish. Thus one of my goals is to determine the mechanism for AVT's effects on behavior by examining whether it can alter the vocal-related firing patterns of neurons in the vocal midbrain.
Matthew Kittelberger is currently funded by an NIH NRSA award under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Bass.

James Liao:

My research interests seek to integrate biomechanics, physiology, and neurobiology to understand the causal patterns of natural, organismal behavior in a phylogenetic context.  My current research focuses on the effect of sensory feedback on spinal motor circuits responsible for swimming in zebrafish. Transgenic lines established by the Fetcho lab and colleagues allow populations of transmitter-specific spinal neurons to express fluorescent dyes, revealing their identity and three-dimensional morphology in vivo. These optical tools, combined with traditional neurophysiological patch-clamp techniques, provide a powerful and direct way to test the functional interconnections of sensory neurons and motor output in an intact, behaving vertebrate. By assessing in vivo the activation of different classes of neurons in response to controlled perturbations, I will explore the role of feed back during axial locomotion. In addition, these questions of neuronal interconnectivity may be addressed with laser ablation experiments to remove individual identified neurons, or take advantage of mutant lines deficient in certain classes of neurons developed by molecular biologists. Most importantly, the recent advances in the field of zebrafish genetics, development, and neurobiology offer an unparalleled opportunity to address longstanding organismal and evolutionary questions.

The mechanisms of behavior are integrative by nature. Many questions remain concerning the physical, physiological, and ecological aspects of locomotion in turbulent flows. Investigating the effects of sensory inputs on swimming motor patterns on zebrafish for my postdoctoral work will enable me to establish a research program that will incorporate disciplines ranging from engineering to neurophysiology to generate new, testable hypotheses that are designed to elucidate organismal structure and function. My vision of marrying complementary skill sets and new technologies from different fields to promote novel insights into organismal behavior will come from continued collaborations with colleagues, such as those I initiated with engineers during my doctoral work. Ultimately my goal is to establish a comparative research program that places detailed, mechanistic and integrated laboratory work in the context of natural history. By evaluating the ecological relevance of these behaviors in the field I hope to gain insight into the factors leading to the evolutionary radiation of ray-finned fishes.
James Liao is currently funded by an NIH NRSA award under the supervision of Prof.

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DEPARTMENT NEWS

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New Funding for Animal Behavior Graduate Students in NBB
Beginning in 2003, the Department has been able to fund a small number of research grants for graduate students conducting studies of animal behavior.  Field and laboratory studies are supported, but the research must have a strong whole-organism orientation.  Last year, eight students were granted funds for such things as travel to field sites, field station fees, paying the living expenses of field assistants, and purchasing supplies and equipment.  The funds for these grants, up to $2000 per student, come from a brainchild of Charlie Walcott who suggested we offer a course in animal behavior in Cornell's summer school, since such courses can be rather profitable for the sponsoring department.   Once it became clear that this is indeed the case, the chairman, Ron Harris-Warrick decided to dedicate the income from the summer version of BioNB 221 to a fund for support of graduate studies in animal behavior.

Cornell Undergrads to Study in Kenya
The Department will begin offering a new undergraduate course this summer entitled “Tropical Field Ecology and Behavior”.  This exciting new field course will take 16 Cornell Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors to the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya for a 3-week field course in July 2005.  The course is cross-listed in Neurobiology and Behavior and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and will be co-taught by Irby Lovette, an Assistant

Professor in EEB, and Dustin Rubenstein, a fifth-year graduate student in NBB who has worked extensively in Kenya for the past five years.  This course is designed to give students a broad hands-on understanding of ecology and behavioral ecology and will involve students designing and completing their own small research projects.  Interested in learning more? Visit the course webpage at http://www.eeb.cornell. edu/department/ courses/265/.

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GRAD STUDENT NEWS

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Josh Ladau (5^th yr. Grad) will be taking a postdoctoral position at the Santa Fe Institute.  He will continue work involving developing robust statistical methods for detecting the effects of competition on ecological communities and using those methods to understand how complex ecological patterns arise from simple stochastic processes.

Carlos Botero (4^th yr. Grad) won two travel awards from the Cornell Grad School and the International Society for Behavioral Ecology to present his research at the July 2004 ISBE meetings in Finland.  Carlos, a native of Columbia, has recently become a Research Associate at the Alexander von Humboldt Research Institute of Biological Resources in Colombia.

Last spring, Sam Flaxman (6^th yr. Grad) was given a teaching award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences for his role as a TA in Paul Sherman’s Advanced Animal Behavior course taught during the fall of 2003.

Judith Scarl (2^nd yr. Grad) was awarded three research grants in the spring of 2004 to fund her research on vocal communication in Australian cockatoos (American Ornithologists' Union, Cornell Sigma Xi, and a student research grant in animal behavior from the Department -- see page 6 for more on these new awards). 

Charlotte Jander (1^st yr. Grad) received two research grants which will allow her to return to Panama this spring to expand her master’s research on fig/wasp mutualisms, (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Cornell Graduate School).

Luke Remage-Healey (5^th yr. Grad) received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for his research on the rapid effects of steroid hormones on vocal communication in gulf toadfish. 

Dustin Rubenstein (5^th yr. Grad) received grants from the National Science Foundation, Animal Behavior Society, Wilson Ornithological Society, American Museum of Natural History, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell Grad School, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and Cornell Sigma Xi for his research on the evolution of cooperative breeding in African starlings.  He presented this work at the 2004 Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology annual meetings in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2004 and won a Poster Award. 

Jay Mager, (6^th yr. Grad) will be finishing his Ph.D. later this spring and has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor at Ohio Northern University.  As the resident ‘loonatic’ at ONU, he will be able to pursue his interest in undergraduate education as well as continue his research with loons.

WISH LIST
NBB has several named funds which help to maintain the ‘operating systems’ of the department; we are always happy to accept contributions to these funds: Neurobiology and Behavior Excellence Fund: Undergraduate research projects, travel for students to scientific meetings. William T. Keeton Fund for the Enhancement of Teaching:  Development of new teaching aids, etc. relating to undergraduate teaching of Intro Biology, and the William T. Keeton prize (annual award to outstanding student in Introductory Biology for academic excellence).  Dr. Cynthia Kagarise Sherman Fund: Undergraduate NBB major, with the Outstanding Honors Thesis in Behavior. Dr. Miriam M. Salpeter Fund:  Undergraduate NBB major, with the Outstanding Honors Thesis in Neurobiology.  NBB Advancement Fund:  Development of new teaching aids; purchase of equipment and instrumentation for teaching and research; seminar speakers; undergraduate research projects, summer research; travel for students to scientific meetings, project sites, etc. Capranica Fund:  Programs for grads (purchase of equipment and instrumentation for teaching and research, special seminar speakers; research projects; summer research work; travel to scientific meetings, etc. Perry Gilbert Fund:  Honoraria and other expenses related to the Perry W. Gilbert Lectureship. Rosenblatt Fund:  Expenses related to the Rosenblatt Lecture Series. If you would like more information about these or other gift opportunities, please contact the Chairman’s Office, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, 607-254-4340 or tmn3@cornell.edu.		To make a donation, please cut on the above line and return this portion, along with a check to: Chair's Office Neurobiology & Behavior W363 Mudd Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 I would like to contribute: $25_____  $50_____  $75_____ Other $__________ To the following Fund(s): __________________________________________ __________________________________________ Contributor Name and Address __________________________________________ __________________________________________ __________________________________________