If you happen to be at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC today, stop by the Q?rius exhibit to talk to Noor about her research! Being at the museum gives the Braun Lab great opportunities for public outreach. Flier is here.

Michael Braun and Kathryn Rodriguez-Clark participated in the Red Siskin Conservation Planning Workshop at Parque Zoologico y Botanico Barrarida (PZBB) during the week of November 16, 2014.  Mike was joined by Robert Rice, Director of the SMBC Bird Friendly Coffee program, and Warren Lynch, SCBI avian breeding expert, as well as 40+ participants from Venezuela to advance plans for captive breeding, education and outreach, field research and reintroduction to shade coffee farms.  PZBB is located in Lara state where the Red Siskin, known as el Cardenalito in Venezuela, is the official bird.  Attention from the media and strong outreach by Venezuelan team members, especially PZBB and Provita, are helping to build support for conservation of the Red Siskin and protection of biodiversity in general. More information here!

Kathryn Rodriguez-Clark and Mike Braun working for Red Siskin conservation!

Congratulations to postdoc HC Lim on a recent publication in the journal, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. The paper is entitled “Distribution and prey of migratory songbirds on the northern coastline of Singapore,” and a PDF of it can be found here.

Our next PhyloPizza event will take place on Tuesday, November 11, at 5:30pm on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, MD (Room 1103 of the Bioscience Research Building). Jack Sullivan will give a talk entitled “A Comparative Phylogeographic Approach to Predicting Cryptic Diversity- The Inland Temperate Rainforest as a Model System.” Join us! Keep up to date with future events here. Flier for this event here.

The IUCN Captive Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG) reported on the SCBI Red Siskin Recovery Workshop in their October monthly eNewsletter, available here. Congrats to Mike and Brian! For more information on the project, see the “Red Siskin Recovery” tab.

Our next PhyloPizza event will take place Tuesday, October 14, at 5:30 in the National Museum of Natural History’s Vertebrate Zoology Seminar Room (WG-33). Graham Slater will give a talk entitled “Putting the Fourth Dimension Back in Macroevolution: Fossil, Phylogenies, and the Evolution of Morphological Diversity.” Join us! Keep up to date with future events here. Flier for this event here.

The Braun Lab is busy as a woodpecker and the webpage is getting all sorts of new content! Check out photos from Mike and Brian’s expedition to Guyana, as well as from our recent Frontiers in Phylogenetics Symposium. Also take a gander at the new ‘Red Siskin Recovery Project’ page, and get in touch if you have any questions!

The Fourth Annual Frontiers in Phylogenetics Symposium entitled “Genome-Scale Phylogenetics: Analyzing the Data” was held on September 15, 2014 in the Warner Brothers Theatre, National Museum of American History. The event was sponsored by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Office of the Undersecretary of Science and the Laboratories of Analytical Biology as well as the Washington Area Phylogenetics Consortium. Michael Braun, NMNH, and Guillermo Orti, GWU, were lead organizers for this event. Over 325 people representing over 90 institutions were registered for this symposium and 650 computers were tuned to the live webcast. Watch a recording of the symposium at Ustream (archived in 3 parts): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Stay tuned for some photos from the occasion! The program is available here.

L-R: Derrick Zwickl, Luay Nakhleh, Kevin Kocot, Guillermo Orti, Dave Swofford, Bastien Boussau, Lacey Knowles and Ingo Ebersberger

Congratulations to postdoc HC Lim (and friends) on a very recent publication in the journal, The Auk. The paper is entitled “Divergence history of the Rufous-tailed Tailorbird (Orthotomus sericeus) of Sundaland: Implications for the biogeography of Palawan and the taxonomy of island species in general,” and a PDF of it can be found here.

Our next PhyloPizza event will take place Tuesday, September 9, at 5:30 in the National Museum of Natural History’s Executive Conference Room. Marc Allard will give a talk entitled “GenomeTrakr: A Source Tracking Network of NGS Desktop Sequencers.” Join us! Keep up to date with future events here. Flier for this event here.