Grace Smith Vidaurre

I'm currently studying an introduced parrot as a model to
understand how species respond to global trends in human activity. I grew up traveling between my hometowns in Rhode Island and Nicaragua, and have maintained an interest in collaborating across international boundaries.

I pursued my scientific and cultural interests at Haverford College, where I majored in Biology and Spanish. I became interested in using parrots as models to ask evolutionary questions while volunteering at Foster Parrots Ltd/The New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, and reading the literature about the evolution of vocal learning.

I joined the Wright Lab at New Mexico State University in Fall 2013 as a new PhD student on the monk parakeet research. Since then, I've collaborated with a former lab mate on hummingbird visual and vocal learning, co-developed a package in R for streamlined bioacoustics analyses and created genomic libraries of monk parakeet populations across the U.S., Spain and Argentina. I'm working on bioinformatics analyses with this iteration of genomic data, and preparing for a 9 month Fulbright field season in Uruguay next year to study native monk parakeets across a gradient of human land-use.

I've been fortunate to count on many excellent mentors and collaborators, and look forward to upcoming collaborations with the monk parakeet research. Check out my CV through the Wright lab website, or my GitHub blog for code (right now mostly related to map-making). If you're interested in bioacoustics analyses, check out warbleR, co-developed by Marcelo Araya-Salas, available on CRAN and GitHub, also recently published as an application paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Kevin R. Burgio, PhD

Aside from looking for salamanders, frogs, and worms with my daughter, I am broadly interested in the mechanisms of species range limitations and how disturbance (climate change and habitat fragmentation) influences species distribution patterns and extinction processes. My research focuses on using an integrative approach to understanding parrot distributions; the ecology, biogeography, and assembly of vertebrate communities; and extinction in parrots and parasites.

I am in my last semester of my PhD program and will be defending my dissertation in December! In my dissertation, I explore the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet, the only parrot endemic to the United States, in addition to creating a framework to prioritizing global parrot diversity conservation in the face of climate change. Despite being PhD candidate, I have published research ranging from championing parasite conservation, to large scale rodent diversity, to theoretical ecology. My CV can be found here.

Prior to graduate school, I conducted research on Monk Parakeets in efforts to come up with a non-lethal method of preventing them from nesting on utility poles - this work can be found here! This research has led to a patent and an agreement with a Connecticut-based manufacturer to build devices we believe will be a solution that both utility companies and those who care deeply for these parrots will support. For more information, please see this article. Lastly, to burnish my Monk Parakeet cred, I authored the revision of the Birds of North America account which will be published next month by Cornell University and AOU!