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.

October 2016