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Anya Auerbach

@aauerbach.bsky.social
887 followers 564 following 282 posts

Visiting prof at Oberlin College | PhD from UMN EEB studying Madagascar’s bird radiations | Loves birds, diversification, biodiversity, teaching evolution, and (natural) history museums | Queer. Organizer. Still a NYer at heart.

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Reposted by Anya Auerbach
Ethan Linck @elinck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I'm hiring a postdoc to help build tools for inferring complex speciation histories with genomic data. strong computational skills are a must, but this is a training opportunity. 60K$+ salary, 2 years, details flexible. please reach out! (and repost) ad here: jobs.montana.edu/postings/53150
jobs.montana.edu
Postdoctoral Researcher
The Department of Ecology at Montana State University is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Scholar as part of NSF-funded research on speciation under alternating cycles of gene flow and isolation (fundi...
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Josef Uyeda @pseudacris.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
New preprint led by grad student Caleb Charpentier that I'm very excited about! This is a hefty review & perspective on how we can close the gap in trust between new "Deep comparative methods", and the biological meaning & inferences that systematists want. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
ecoevorxiv.org
On the Promise (and Practice) of Deep Comparative Methods: Expressivity, Limitations, and Design
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Oh 100%, one of my absolute favorite things with which to blow the minds of first years (along with the “we are all archaea”). Did all of human evolutionary history (starting there) in 50 minutes today!
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This (superb) reporting reveals ASU has basically attempted a full cover-up and the only reason they aren’t going to get away with it is the genuine courage and solidarity of his teammates. Very rare in college sport.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/09/2026
"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Today in department meeting somebody asked if caterpillars can go in the compost bin.
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Cellular Tracking Technologies @celltracktech.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
A Northern Waterthrush tagged in Cape May, NJ left after sunset on Sep 11. Two weeks later it was over Colombia! Jamaica -> Colombia included ~800 km of open Caribbean. 3,082 km so far! @birdscanada.bsky.social @originalstu.bsky.social #MotusWTS #BirdMigration #ornithology @nature.org
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Joseph W. Brown @josephwb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... From @phylieu.bsky.social @sinkingdiatom.bsky.social @omearabrian.bsky.social
academic.oup.com
Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors
Abstract. Large phylogenetic trees are often unbalanced near the root, with a species-depauperate lineage sister to a far more species-rich clade. The spec
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Thanks to my enterprising first years I learned today about some depths of junk journal hell I had never previously witnessed. They mostly did well on their outlines and annotated bibliographies and this should make for a great learning opportunity! But wooow is it bad out there.
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April Wright @wrightam.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Something else I think we need to think about is what this short-sightedness means for our fundamental stem resources. A narrow focus on ROI impacts basic science facilities, which take a long time to build and not much time to destroy www.newsobserver.com/opinion/arti...
newsobserver.com
UNC just inherited a great collection. Will it build a great program? | Opinion
Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill merged their plant collections to create the third-largest university herbarium in the country. | Opinion
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Ben Sheldon @sheldonbirds.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I remember seeing Margaret Attwood at the IOC in Vancouver in 2018 - the closest thing to Canadian royalty?! Excellent to see a chair in Ornithology being endowed - see quoted tweet for direct details & more background in this @theguardian.com article www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...
theguardian.com
‘Birdwatching is close to rapture’: Margaret Atwood on why she has given C$1m to avian research
Award-winning novelist celebrates late partner’s love of birds with gift to establish the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology
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Sara Lipshutz (she/her) @jacanamama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Super excited to share this study by @gamaevo.bsky.social in collaboration with Steve Nowicki and Susan Peters!! Response to geographic song variation predicts differential gene expression in the blood of a songbird: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Response to geographic song variation predicts differential gene expression in the blood of a songbird
Behavioral neuroscience; Ecology; Transcriptomics
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Guillermo Navalón @gnavalon.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Quite an updated and deep outlook on the main problems (and potential solutions!) in avian phylogenetics, past and present, stem and crown! Also very well written & nice to read, congrats you both (J. Benito is not in bluesky yet)!
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Artologica aka Michele Banks @artologica.net · 23/09/2026
There it is 😡
Nature, which previously reported on NSF’s grants shortfall, said it can “be attributed mainly” to the agency keeping more than $1 billion in an account, much of which is for the White House’s Grand Research Challenges project, which is meant to support specific fields, including artificial intelligence. The project was mentioned in one line in a Sept. 10 NSF memo: “In the coming weeks and months, NSF will announce a series of Grand Research Challenges to take thesis-driven bets that stand to unlock new frontiers of S&T [science and technology].”
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Milton Tan @mtanichthys.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Newly accepted work I contributed to: Challenges for reproducibility in species delimitation academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...
academic.oup.com
Challenges for reproducibility in species delimitation
Abstract. Species richness is a foundational metric for comparing biodiversity among clades and regions in ecology, evolution, and conservation. As the bio
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Dr. K. Lotterhos @drk-lo.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm hiring a bioinformatician! Review of applications starts October 1 with a start date as soon as possible. 🧪 #Genomics #popGen #CompBio northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...
northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Bioinformatician - Lotterhos Lab
About the Opportunity About the Center for Marine Ecological Genomics The successful candidate will be based at the Lotterhos Lab and the Center for Marine Ecological Genomics at Northeastern Marine S...
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Kory Evans Ph.D @sternarchella.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Really excited to share our latest paper with you! We examine patterns of skull shape evolution in an awesome group of fishes and show that they rapidly innovated following the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...
urldefense.com
Selection, constraints, and contingency drive mosaic patterns of evolution during the carangarian adaptive radiation
Adaptive radiations generate remarkable morphological diversity, yet traits often diversify at different rates and modes, producing mosaic patterns of evolution. Modularity, the semiautonomous organization of traits, can shape how selection and ...
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Hengxing Zou @hengxingzou.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
You might have seen the paper @science.org last week on the solar panels decreasing bird biodiversity. Our reanalysis, led by the talented Yangkang Chen, found fundamental, retraction-worthy flaws in their results, especially from the citizen science data and their models… (1/6)
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Isabel @isabelott.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
“The issues [we face] now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.”
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Also worth re-upping: Mathematicians standing up against how their field is being used as marketing for OpenAI and the like: leidendeclaration.ai >>
leidendeclaration.ai
Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
This declaration calls for action to address the challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligence within mathematics research.
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Dan MacGuigan @dmacguig.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
New paper in Systematic Biology! We show how micro-synteny can help resolve a tricky fish #phylogenetic problem where traditional sequence-based analyses fall short. Genomes archive evolutionary history in more than just their basepairs. doi.org/10.1093/sysb... #fish #genomics #evolution
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Pranav Gokhale @pranav-gokhale.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Hi ecologists! I’m looking for papers on the outcome of nest predation in birds When a predator attacks a nest, how often does this result in complete loss of the clutch/brood versus partial predation, where some eggs or nestlings survive? complete vs. partial #Ornithology #Ecology #Predation
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Cristian Román-Palacios @cromanpa.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
When two clades evolve together, can the trees alone tell you how often they cospeciated, and how often the symbiont switched hosts? We think so! Our paper, led by @yichaozeng.bsky.social, shows that branch length differences in the cophylogeny are informative enough to estimate six rates at once
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Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 @daveyfwright.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Deep breath. Screams from the top of my lungs: "Producing species-dense sampling at biodiversity scale requires the material and expertise already held in natural history collections" 🧪
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
What if I randomly alternated means of contacting you about the same topic, would that help. (I have had students do this)
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Aw yeah I love some experimental taphonomy.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Oh this is great, thank you! Might pair it with something more recent that will also introduce them to ML/Bayesian inference in phylogenetics, which is the focus of the next R exercise.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Hey paleo friends, looking for paper recs (for my macroevolution senior seminar)! Topic is currently labeled as “deep time, fossils, taphonomy”. I’d ideally like a research paper that will expose my students to some “typical” paleobio research, but include discussion of biases in the fossil record.
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Ina Satokangas @inasatok.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
A cool bunch of new speciation papers out recently in Molecular Ecology, looking at divergence, hybridisation, recombination, genome architecture, and so on! Genomics of Speciation special issue: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1... #speciation #divergence #hybridisation #recombination #genomics
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Special Issue: Genomics of Speciation: Molecular Ecology
Molecular Ecology is an international journal for research using molecular genetic techniques to address questions in ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
One of my students is a math double major (and doing a phylogenetics-based honors thesis) and I think she’s excited to dig into it more!
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I’ll include more paleo stuff when we get to specifically learning about things like quantifying traits and diversification analyses, but I’ve got no shortage of papers in mind for that!
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Hey paleo friends, looking for paper recs (for my macroevolution senior seminar)! Topic is currently labeled as “deep time, fossils, taphonomy”. I’d ideally like a research paper that will expose my students to some “typical” paleobio research, but include discussion of biases in the fossil record.
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Laura Lagomarsino, PhD @tropicalbotany.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Look, y'all— this is not the worst outcome, but it's also not great. Framing this as gaining a notably large herbarium is spin; the reality is a historic, important herbarium has lost its identity. The specimens were never going to be trashed; Duke still voluntarily truncated their botanical legacy.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Yeah, I hear “merger” and I think fewer jobs, fewer training and teaching opportunities. Collections folks have seen this happen too many times.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Defending in July and starting a visiting professor job in August does not leave a lot of time for putting together job applications due in early September :/ Not that this is anyone’s fault but my own of course, it just sucks! (Venting over thank you)
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
This is an awesome resource, thank you! I already assigned a bit as reading in my macroevolution seminar last week.
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Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.
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MEPGT @mepgt.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Very important paper by @phylogenetrips.bsky.social "Genes and sites under adaptation at the phylogenetic scale also exhibit adaptation at the population-genetic scale" | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Genes and sites under adaptation at the phylogenetic scale also exhibit adaptation at the population-genetic scale | PNAS
Adaptation in protein-coding sequences can be detected from multiple sequence alignments across species or alternatively by leveraging polymorphism...
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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Why make the page, I asked @ce7an.bsky.social. Nobody will read it, I said. And here we are, with Cheeto being the most widely read page in the UC Davis High Performance Computing website. hpc.ucdavis.edu/people/cheet...
hpc.ucdavis.edu
Dr. Cheeto Cat
Cheeto joined HPC@UCD as a stray scholar-in-residence and has since established himself as a permanent fixture of academic life. Although lacking a formal degree, he has consistently demonstrated exce...
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 26/08/2026
Nature honors Dolly Parton's scientific legacy. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Dolly Parton dies aged 80 – researchers celebrate her contributions to science
The country singer was an advocate for vaccines, public health, literacy and marginalized communities.
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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
The IDF does this all the time. They lie until they can't, then they say they'll do an investigation, then the investigation leads nowhere. It took 2.5 years for them to even admit they opened fire on the car, something we all knew happened hours after they did.
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Rob Denton @rddenton.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
[JOB!] I'm hiring for a really exciting postdoc position. A combination of breeding experiments, conservation genomics, and student mentorship. Room/board at the @amnh.org Southwestern Research Station each summer, 40 months of support, new science building at BSU. Share broadly! ad: bit.ly/4hKaUIL
A human hand holds a medium sized green frog with distinct gray spots and yellow eyes. This is a Chiricahua Leopard Frog, a threatened species native to the southwest US and Mexico.
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David Tan @mangrovepitta.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
My 2nd PhD chapter on the phylogeography of the Mangrove and Blue-winged Pittas is now on BioRxiv! Here we used genomic and palaeogeographic methods to show that, despite their similarities, the 2 species are strongly diverged, potentially due to differing ecologies. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Blue-winged PittaMangrove Pitta
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17/08/2026
1. Recently I’ve received lots of emails from people I don’t know personally, asking for my feedback on their books or papers. They explain the connection between my work and theirs and ask me to take a look. The catch, of course, is that the emails are transparently, obviously, written by AI.
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Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Big evolutionary events can fool phylogenetic analyses. A new approach combines phylogenetic regression with eigenvectors to reduce false positives and better account for the history written in genomes. doi.org/10.1093/evle...
doi.org
Characterizing and mitigating confounding by unreplicated evolutionary events in phylogenetic regression
Abstract. When researchers want to test for a direct effect of one attribute on another using interspecific data, they need to account for the confounding
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Mark Westneat 🐟 @mwestneat.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Surgeonfishes are cool! Our Evolution paper now out in final form, the amazing patterns of change in fish shape and covariance (new method!) elegantly revealed by @linnealungstrom.bsky.social 🐟🐠🦑🌿 academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
academic.oup.com
Phylogenetics, trait covariance analysis, and the evolution of fin and body shape in the surgeonfishes
Abstract. Insights into ecomorphology are enriched when investigating evolutionary correlations between ecologically and functionally important traits. How
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Aramati Casper @aramaticasper.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Why is there "no consensus" about sex in biology? Turns out, we're using seven different concepts. In "Evolution, development and the incoherence of sex" we name & elucidate these concepts. With Karen Warkentin and Jay Falk @jjinsing.bsky.social @sicbjournals.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/icb/...
The cover of the article, in Integrative and Comparative Biology. The image caption is "Examples of seven biological phenomena sometimes called sex and the evolutionary relationships among them. The seven sex concepts are depicted with images: 0) horizontal gene transfer, 1) meiosis and syngamy, 2) anisogamy, 3) the gametes produced by an individual, 4) traits often associated with gamete production, 5) processes that bring gametes in proximity to facilitate syngamy, 6) processes/behaviors/traits derived from sex5.
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Absolute banger of a headline
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Definitely want to get around to reading that at some point soon!
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Anya Auerbach @aauerbach.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
This semester I'm designing a freshman seminar I've titled "Evolution and Society". Post-defense I'm now working on course planning details, & have both too many ideas & worry what I'm neglecting.. What would you consider an essential topic(s) or reading(s) for a class like this? Please do share!
Image of the course description, which reads: Our society has been shaped by evolutionary ideas. Learning about evolution has led people to question human nature, our place in the natural world, and what that means for us as individuals and a society. Through reading, discussion, and museum visits, this class will explore how evolutionary study has filled us with wonder and a sense of kindship with all living things, been used to justify some of humanity’s greatest atrocities, and continues to be misused and misunderstood today. With grounding in the logic of evolutionary theory, we will ask how understanding evolution does – or doesn’t – help us understand ourselves. Field trip(s) required.
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