Division of Animal Behavior

Fall Newsletter 2019

Seven students have been selected to compete in this year’s Marlene Zuk Award for Best Student Presentation. Our judging panel, composed of the DAB executive committee, Program Officer-elect Kathleen Lynch, and previous Marlene Zuk Award winner Sydney Hope selected these finalists on the basis of their extended abstracts. The finalists are (in reverse alphabetical order): Yusan Yang, Lewis Naisbett-Jones, Liza Mitchem, Kayla Goforth, Zachary Emberts, Jason Dinh, and Kelsey Brass. These students will each present the results of their research in a special “Zuk Award” session on January 5th starting at 1:30 pm. Please join us in congratulating these finalists!

We are looking forward to our annual meeting in Austin, TX, this coming January and hope folks will participate in several opportunities through the DAB, especially those events that support our students and early career members! Please join us for the following:

The 2020 meeting in Austin is shaping up to be another large one, with an amazing array of talks, posters, and symposia. Program officers met in October 2019, and the venue looks great, with lots of nearby restaurants, a nearby market, and taco trucks within two blocks. The hotel and conference facilities are all in the same building with an outdoor pool (heated) and large fitness room. The river is just a few blocks away. Let’s hope it is warmer than the last time we were in Austin! Remember to bring a water bottle and coffee mug. Water dispensers will be available in all the presentation rooms for you to refill you cups, but we won’t be providing disposable cups.

The program committee processed almost 2000 abstract submissions into 140 sessions and 11 symposia. Almost 400 of those were on topics related to Animal Behavior. This year the Division of Animal Behaviour co-sponsored the following symposia: 1) Epigenetic Variation in Endocrine Systems, 2) Reproduction: the female perspective from an integrative and comparative framework, 3) Bio-inspiration of silent flight of owls and other flying animals: recent advances and unanswered questions, 4) Long Limbless Locomotors: The mechanics and biology of elongate, limbless vertebrate locomotion, 5) Applied Functional Biology: linking ecological morphology to conservation and management, and 6) Integrative comparative cognition: can neurobiology and neurogenomics inform comparative analyses of cognitive phenotype?

Planning for the 2020 SICB meeting in Austin: Please don’t forget that presenters must register by November 6, 2019 and early registration discounts end on December 4th!

The Best Student Presentation competitions are always a highlight of our annual meeting. DAB supports one of the largest and most dynamic BSP competitions in our society, and these competitions are made possible by the dedication and the many DAB judges. As you prepare for Austin, please consider serving as a judge for this year’s post competition- your thoughtful critiques of our student’s work are critical for this competition and are always much appreciated by the students.

SICB Student and Postdoc Funding Opportunities: While the deadlines for the Broadening Participation Travel Award (funds to attend the 2020 SICB meeting), Charlotte Magnum Student Support Program (funds to attend the 2020 SICB meeting), Dorothy M. Skinner Award (funds for female scientists (often postdocs) to attend the 2020 SICB meeting), and GIAR/FGST(funds to support student research (Grants in Aid of Research and Fellowship of Graduate Student Travel awards) have already past, I wanted to bring these funding opportunities to the attention of the students and postdocs in DAB. If you missed the deadline this year, plan for next year! It is usually in the middle of October.

Kathleen Lynch, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Hofstra University was elected to the position of DAB Program Officer last spring. Kathleen, a former DAB Best Student Presentation winner, has been a SICB meeting participant since 2002, and has been active both as a best student poster and presentation judge, and as a symposium co-organizer over the last few years. We are excited to welcome her to a new leadership position in the division. During her upcoming term as the Program Officer of the division, Kathleen looks forward to creating integrated sessions that present both the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of behavior. She also aims to reach out to early career scientists and scientists from underrepresented backgrounds to encourage new ideas for symposia. Congratulations Kathleen!

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