Alumni

Everyone below has contributed to our research projects in the lab, and nearly all have achieved undergraduate or graduate degrees in the process. Several other students not included here have worked in the lab over the years as well, as visiting researchers, trainees, research assistants, coders, or technicians. Some of those below could equally be considered active associates, especially Maleha, Macarena, Ar, and Eric, as they are still involved in the lab, especially in converting their theses into publications and joining us for discussions and other meetings and events.

Angelinna Bradfield (2019-2022; Honors BA in Biology, 2021; MA in Biology, 2022)

Angelinna undertook an extensive research project for her undergraduate Biology Honors Thesis, and then expanded the study further and added a second for her Master’s research. Working with Bobby and the Gotham Coyote Project (particularly Mark Weckel and Chris Nagy), Angelinna documented coyote and feral cat occupancy and habitat preferences, as well as broader mammalian diversity, across the New York City metropolitan area. Angelinna is the second person (after Amanda) to get two degrees in the lab. She also achieved the Master’s in by far the fastest time– just one year. She accomplished this partly by taking some of her graduate credits as an undergraduate, and partly by being crazy smart.

Maleha Mahmud (2018-2021; MA in Biology, 2021; lab manager, 2019-2021)

Maleha received a BA in Anthropology with high honors from Queens College. After taking Animal Behavior, Maleha decided to leave Anthropology temporarily to perform research and gain a Master’s degree in Biology. Our lab is very grateful for her decision! Shortly after joining us, she was unanimously voted as the best person to become our third lab manager after Michelle left. She held this position during the most tumultuous and uncertain time in our lab’s history, with DL’s sabbatical followed immediately by COVID. Maleha’s spirit was perfectly suited to manage the lab through this time, with her consistent and unwavering warmth, positivity, encouragement, and devotion. As for research, Maleha joined the Bronx River Ecology Project at its inception. She developed and implemented two projects with Bobby‘s guidance, on how the macroinvertebrate community varies along the stream, and what abiotic and biotic variables are predictive of species diversity and water quality. After receiving her Master’s, she left our lab for the CUNY PhD Program in Anthropology, where she works on nonhuman primates with Shahrina Chowdhury at Brooklyn College.

Mason Youngblood (2015-2021; PhD in Psychology, 2021)

Mason received his BS in Biology from the University of South Carolina, where he studied genetics and behavior in mammalian and insect models. He then joined our lab via the CUNY Psychology Program, with a concentration in Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology. Mason quickly diversified into a remarkably versatile researcher. Although his several studies ranged from neurophysiology to developing ornithological monitoring equipment to conducting bioacoustic analysis, Mason firmly established a home base in cultural evolution, from which the majority of his projects proceeded. He assessed the state of the interdisciplinary field using bibliographic methods; conducted a (still growing) collection of studies of music sampling through time; examined the spread of political extremism as a contagion; and used dynamics of house finch song across several decades to detect biases in social transmission. Mason is the most productive student researcher ever in our lab in terms of projects and publications. By shortly after his departure from our lab, he had published all seven chapters of his dissertation in peer-reviewed scientific journals. His publications from our lab will continue, as he also worked substantially with three of our Master’s students on their projects (Ar, Macarena, and Wendy). Following his PhD he became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. He is part of the Minds and Traditions Research Group, where he continues to pursue a range of projects in cultural evolution.

Amanda Goldstein (2015-2021; BA in Biology, 2017; MA in Biology, 2021)

Amanda began her extensive time with us working on the house finch cultural evolution project. After receiving her BA in Biology, she transitioned into the MA program and looked for a new project. She is interested in ecology and conservation, and long wished that our lab would expand to include more projects in that direction. Her wish came true when Bobby developed the Bronx River Urban Ecology Project, and Amanda quickly joined the team. She fell in love with birds during her time in the lab, and so it was not surprising that her research focus became the diversity and abundance of birds on an urbanization gradient along the Bronx River. Amanda rapidly converted her thesis into a manuscript for publication, and became the second lab member (after Johanna) to publish her Master’s thesis in a peer-reviewed journal (Urban Naturalist) in 2022. She is also the first lab member to receive two degrees while in the lab. Amanda has held various positions in New York City as an environmental educator, ecologist, and conservationist, and she continues to work in this area.

Joderick Castillo (2019-2020; BA in Biology, 2021)

Joderick worked with Mason on the house finch cultural evolution project. He analyzed songs recently recorded in NYC in preparation for a comparison with historical songs. He also worked at a hospital helping afflicted patients during COVID.

Jasmin Alim (2017-2020)

Jasmin’s main focus was in the lab of Dr. Mitchell Baker, determining the effects of natural synergists and organic pesticides for the control of the potato pests. But she was an active presence in our lab for several years. Eventually she conducted research with us as well– she accompanied Bobby on a research expedition to Awash National Park, Ethiopia, and studied nesting associations between Ploceus weaverbirds and other species there.

Cristina Morales (2017-2020; MA in Biology, 2020)

Cristina worked with Andy, exploring the nature of teaching and its relation to cooperation. She wrote a literature review on the evolution of teaching in human and nonhuman animals.

Arya Hawkins-Zafarnia (2017-2020; BA/MA in Biology, 2020)

Arya was one of the most energetic intellectual contributors to our lab from the time he joined us in the spring of 2017 for an unprecedented term of reading a book a week in our lit group.  He has a love of spiders, and an uncanny ability to find them.  Many ideas, field treks, discussions, and a wedding later, he left us for medical school at St. George’s in Grenada.

Oditi Debi (2019-2020; BA in Psychology, 2019)

Oditi was a research assistant on the Bronx River Urban Ecology Project, helping the research team (led by Bobby) to monitor water quality and survey biodiversity. She was of course also part of the rambunctious Oditi-Ritika-Maleha trio. She left our lab for pharmacy school preparation at St. Johns University, and then pharmacy school in Albany.

Christina Takos (2019)

Christina recorded house finches across Brooklyn, Queens, and Nassau County for the house finch cultural evolution project.

Michelle Mordukhaev
(2016-2019; B.A. in Biology, 2017; lab manager, 2016-2019)

Unflappable, cheerful, funny, kind, and universally liked, Michelle was lab manager from 2016-2019. In addition to keeping the lab going, Michelle contributed to a new cultural evolution webpage, worked with Liz on a project documenting the flora of Awash National Park in Ethiopia, and contributed to an academic tribute website in honor of Richard D. Alexander.  She also worked at Alley Pond Environmental Center and was a veterinary assistant at a Long Island animal hospital. She left our lab for veterinary school at St. George’s University in Grenada.

Ar Kornreich
(2016-2019; BA in Biology and Honors Thesis, 2019)

Ar holds the record for hitting the ground running after joining the lab, and her intelligence and industry was an inspiration to the entire group. Ar completed a pair of independent projects on female song. The first is an empirical study of the seldom-noticed phenomenon of female house finch singing. Ar found, contrary to assumptions in the literature, that female song can be just as long and complex as the much more familiar male song. This work was published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology The second project is a review of the literature on the function of female bird song. Ar submitted a paper for publication shortly after graduating, which was accepted at the Wilson Journal of Ornithology in 2020. Ar is the second person (after Khaleda) to publish a first-authored paper based on research performed in the lab as an undergraduate. Ar left our lab to take a doctoral student position in Biology in the laboratory of J. Alan Clark at Fordham University. 

Susie Yin
(2017-2018; 2nd B.A. in Biology, 2017)

Susie worked with Annie on a study of the recovery of oysters in the NYC area.  Focusing on the shoreline of Randall’s Island, in cooperation with the Randall’s Island Park Alliance, especially Chris Girgenti, Susie and Anne collected data on the presence and health of the population, the environmental features that correlate with establishment, and the extent of endoparasitism.

Anne Harrison
(2017-2018; B.A. in Biology, 2017)

Annie worked with Susie on a study of the recovery of oysters in the NYC area.  Focusing on the shoreline of Randall’s Island, in cooperation with the Randall’s Island Park Alliance, especially Chris Girgenti. Annie and Susie collected data on the presence and health of the population, the environmental features that correlate with establishment, and the extent of endoparasitism.

Charles Maniego
(2013-2018; B.A. in Biology 2015)

Charles painstakingly aligned (in an analogous way to genetic aligment by hand) songs of house finches (recorded by Dr. Paul Mundinger) to assess within- and between-individual variation in song structure. He received his BA in Biology and defended his Honors thesis in the lab, and then received a MS in Biomedical Science from Rutgers University. 

Natasza Fontaine
(2015 – 2018)

Natasza is a proficient artist, and one of the best naturalists in the history of our lab. She came to us from A&E television studios, where she was a producer. While in the lab she was engaged in the mockingbird project, recording their song and making behavioral observations. She also got a position at the New York Botanical Garden, where she worked on the World Flora Online Project. She left our lab to enter the Evolution & Ecology Doctoral Program at Florida State University, studying plant biodiversity in the Austin Mast Lab.

Daniel Mann
(2015-2018; PhD in Linguistics, 2018)

Coming to NYC from Arkansas where he had received a BA in History and Spanish, Dan earned a Master’s in Applied Linguistics from Columbia. He then received a PhD in Linguistics here at CUNY. He was essentially coadvised, spending much time in our lab but his linguistics advisor and dissertation Chair being Juliette Blevins at the Graduate Center. Dan has performed research on language acquisition, phonetics and phonology, and comparative and historical linguistics. In our lab he primarily studied the permissivity of vocal learning in the house finch, demonstrating house finch learning of canary trills; this work is published in Bioacoustics. He is now continuing research on both human and bird projects as a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratory of Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna.

Sandy (Harsangeet) Gill
(2015-2018; BA in Biology, 2016)

Sandy helped analyze swamp sparrow vocal development based on recordings of captive individuals. She was careful and thoughtful in her analysis, leaving a good set of data for further analysis when she moved away to upstate New York.

M. Aaron Owen (2010-2017; PhD in Biology, 2017).

Aaron made first contact only a month after the lab was founded. Seven years later he was the most consistently present, social, and intellectually active lab member to have left us so far. Through extensive field work in India, Hawaii, Jamaica, St. Croix, and Mauritius, he discovered rapid evolution by sexual selection following introduction of the small Indian mongoose. He defended his dissertation, Ecology, Evolution, and Sexual Selection in the Invasive, Globally Distributed Small Indian Mongoose (Urva auropunctata) in April 2017. His most important findings were published in 2020 in the journal Evolution. While here, Aaron was a skilled and popular laboratory and recitation instructor. After leaving our lab, Aaron pursued a career in data science, worked for Major League Baseball for a few years, and then moved to the dating app Hinge. His most important research findings were published in 2020 in the journal Evolution, but he also has scientific papers in the Journal of Insect Behavior, Animal Behaviour, and the Canadian Journal of Zoology.

Anna McPherran (2014-2017; BA in Biology and Honors Thesis, 2016). Anna was a pillar of the lab despite her undergraduate status. Her independent research tested for an association between human land use at at a microscale on the phonological structure of house finch songs at several urban areas in California. She also assisted Aaron with his mongoose research in St. Croix. She left us for graduate work in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Stony Brook University.

Christian Van Deurs (2016-2017; MA in Biology). Christian reviewed the evidence for cultural traditions and cultural evolution in mammals for his Master’s thesis. He is a science teacher in the NYC school system by day, and a rock star by night.

Jonathan Goodman
(2016-2017)

Jonathan has been collaborating with DL for years, and continues to do so, but for a couple of years he was officially a postgraduate intern in evolutionary philosophy in our lab. He majored in behavioral biology & neuroscience at Emory University, and did his graduate work in philosophy at University College London and the University of London. His research while interning with us focused on two main topics. First, he examined the degree to which evolutionary theory can explain morality and moral commands such as The Golden Rule. Second, he began a collaborative project (that continues today) pursuing conceptual clarity among various perspectives in the study of cultural evolution. Jonathan then took a fellowship at the Imperial College London and entered Cambridge University’s Department in Archaeology as a doctoral student working with Robert Foley. He is an accomplished editor and scientific journalist, having published widely on various topics including cancer treatment, viral evolution, natural selection, and academic ethics.

Ronveer Chakraborty (2014-2017).After graduating from Queens College with a BA in Biology, Ronveer entered our lab and became one of our most funloving and active members. He studied the moral traditions of the Tiv people.

Mark Megerian (2013-2017; BA in Biology). Mark was long our manager of contributions to the Online Bibliography of Environmental Thought (OBET).

Theresa Crupi (2017; BA in Computer Science).

Stacy Wang (2016; BA in Computer Science).

Teresa Wu (2015-2016; BA in Computer Science).

Nikki Hanson (2014-2015; BA in Computer Science).

Giulietta Coppola (2015-2016; BA in Biology), house finch cultural evolution. Julie also had some crazy adventures in our ornithology class.

Khaleda Khan
(2009-2016; BA with Honors Thesis, 2011; lab manager, 2011-2016)

Khaleda joined our lab at its inception in 2009, and helped shape the lab in innumerable ways in its formative years. She did more than anyone else to establish a lab culture, with her bright openness, irreverent wit, and confident individualism. She became our lab’s first manager, a position she defined and created for herself, and maintained for six years. She achieved great success in research, mentoring, and collection curation. Khaleda first studied the behavior of African Ploceus weaverbirds; for her honors undergraduate thesis she characterized the behavior of male village weavers (Ploceus cucullatus) at a breeding colony in Ethiopia. She later brought Bobby onto this project, which is now published in two papers in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology. Khaleda’s paper there on male behavior at the colony represents the first first-author publication for undergraduate research in our lab. In later research she helped describe the interaction of inherited and learned factors in the development of swamp sparrow song. She also spent three years as the Archivist of the Paul Mundinger house finch recording collection, training and leading dozens of undergraduate researchers in the identification and parsing of the songs of thousands of house finch individuals.  After leaving our lab she obtained training in web design, and is now a software developer for TeamPay, a spend management platform.

Chenghui Ju (2011-2015; PhD., Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, 2015).

Chenghui “Oranju” was our lab’s second researcher to defend a doctoral dissertation, although with her rapid sprint to the finish she was the first to complete all requirements and get the degree!  She defended her dissertation, Cultural Evolution in Natural Populations: A Quantitative Bioacoustic Analysis, in July 2015. She developed a software package for bioacoustic analysis, FinchCatcher, which set the bar and established our analytical methods for the cultural evolution project for years to come. She then took a faculty position at the Nanjing Forestry University. She then helped additional students finish their cultural evolution and bird song projects from a distance. Her research in our lab was published in The Auk, now Ornithology. 

Cheyenne Ganesh (2013-2015; BA in Biology and Honors thesis). Cheyenne joyfully traced vocal development in swamp sparrows, detailing implications for learned vs. inherited song features.

Daniele DeLeone (2014-2015; CUNY BA in Anthrozoology) worked on cultural evolution and the Trolley Problem. She went on to schooling in alternative medicine and clinical psychology, and after an extended stint in Sweden now studies psychology in Florida. 

Elliot Aguilar (2009-2015; PhD., Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, 2016).

Elliot was our lab’s first doctoral student, brought an energetic spirit, a diverse and quantitative intellect, and a remarkable independence– as well as our first NSF funding!– to the lab. He was the first member of the lab to study cultural evolution, formed an impressive collaborative and idea-exchange network, and connected the lab to several researchers in the process, especially Stefano Ghirlanda of Brooklyn College. He defended his dissertation,Models and Methods in Social and Cultural Evolution, in June 2015. Elliot then took a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, in the laboratory of Erol Akçay. Elliot trained in data science following his postdoc, and then took a job with Vroom, the online auto retailer. His work in our lab is published in Theoretical Population Biology and PLoS ONE among other places.

Gianna McArthur
(2011-2015)

Gianna came to us from Vassar as a graduate student and was one of the first lab members to record house finches. Later she became our most significant contributor to the Online Bibliography of Environmental Thought (OBET). She also worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  She has since become an attorney.

Abudoula Nulumu (2014-2015) preanalyzed house finch songs for the cultural evolution project. Abudoula also developed a valuable mobile quiz game app for the lab.

Johanna Navarro (2009-2015; MA, Biology, 2015). 

Johanna was our lab’s first Master’s student and was the first to receive a Master’s degree– and she published almost immediately after defending (in PLoS ONE). She is independent, confident, and thoughtful. Her hand was so steady (perhaps from years of applying makeup to women’s eyes at Bloomingdales) that she could operate the UV-VIS spectrophotometer with virtually no user error (most researchers have ~3%). She helped establish graduate research in the lab, along with Wendy and Rose. She performed and published experimental tests on the effect of light on bird egg color, and also conducted a comparative study of the evolution of egg color in ratites. After leaving us she became a faculty member at Queensborough Community College.

Gennesis Zuleta (2013-2014), studied morality of the Mossi and Kpelle people of West Africa. Genn worked at a furious pace while here, and then went on to receive a Master’s in Psychology at Hunter College.

Seema Choudhary (2009-2014; BA in Biology, and Honors Thesis, 2011).

Seema was one of our first three lab members (along with Stephanie and Khaleda). She studied original reports of local uses of woody plants in The Gambia in West Africa, and discovered several local medicinal uses that had not yet been documented. Seema brought her project nearly to the point of being a monograph, a goal we still hope to reach.

Stephanie Kandasami (2009-2014; BA in Biology, and Honors Thesis, 2011).

Stephanie, one of our first three lab members (along with Seema and Khaleda), studied the divergence of moral codes between West African cultures, a daunting long-term project she began and led for five years, and that continues in our lab. Steph was social glue and a force for friendliness and good will in the lab. She left us to earn a Master’s of Public Health at Columbia University, and now continues to work for the wellness of humanity at The Global Fund.

Alison (Bromberg) Powell (2012-2014). Alison took over the swamp sparrow vocal development project for her tenure as a graduate student, in between being an energetic proponent of Weezer. I will be forever grateful for that opportunity she provided me (fulfilling her promise upon joining our lab) of hanging out with them for an evening after their show. 

Julieana Steiner (2013-2014; BA, Biology, 2014), house finch cultural evolution; lab comedienne– razor sharp wit with millisecond timing.

Trisha Guduru (2013), house finch cultural evolution, one of the first cohort of those who located and parsed songs digitized from Dr. Paul Mundinger’s recoreings.

Simon Lee (2013-2014; BA, Biology, 2013) worked on house finch cultural evolution project. Simon was the first student to productively parse and document house finch songs from the Mundinger archive for Cornell’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. 

Maureen (Pereyra) Banach (2011-2012; BA, Biology, 2012). Maureen was one of the pioneers of our lab’s foray into the analysis of vocal ontogeny in birds, focusing on the swamp sparrow. Upon distinguishing herself in the Honors program, she left us to become a PhD student at the University of Rochester. She defended her dissertation in Immunology in 2018, and then took a postdoc at the University of Colorado. She is now a senior scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb.

Jackie Song (2011-2013). Jackie conducted an extensive and well-documented survey of house finch song in California, assisted by Andy, that led to analyses by Eric, Anna, and Wendy. Jackie established our Facebook page, and kicked our social gatherings into higher gear.

Nardai Mootoo, (2010-2012), Nardai contributed to the project on moral diversity among West African cultures, and also to the Online Bibliography of Environmental Thought.

Lauren Adragna (2011-2012), Swamp sparrow vocal development. Lauren was our lab’s first– but certainly not the last!– animal lover with veterinary aspirations. 

Rose Chin-Hong (2010-2012), Ethiopian flora. Rose is a lifelong botanist at heart, and still frequents Queens College.

Sharon Slomovich (2009-2010), Swamp sparrow vocal development. Sharon became the first of our lab members to go on to medical school, after which she has also actively engaged in medical research.

Beata (Rozbicka) Sadigh (2009-2010). Betty studied the morality of the Bemba people of Zambia, which would later feature in Stephanie‘s comparative study. Betty has been back occasionally, in courses and discussion seminars. She received a Master’s degree, and then became a teacher. 

Rita Monfort (2009-2011), Parasite epidemiology in baboons, Wolbachia-host coevolution, cuckoo-host coevolution, human evolution, and sperm competition in baboons. Rita performed research in Ethiopia during our first expedition there in 2010.