New preprint from the last portion of my PhD! Despite low masked load, we found evidence for strong inbreeding depression in Devils Hole pupfish. The reason? A recessive lethal haplotype that causes a heart defect among developing embryos. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📢New warbler research!📢 A phylogeny of Myioborus (the youngest genus of warblers) plus a hypothesis for how they diversified in South America and a gene causing a color difference between hybridizing species. It was great co-leading this with Laura Céspedes Arias. doi.org/10.1093/evol...

I’m so excited to be able to finally share that @devonderaad.bsky.social was awarded one of the AOS Early Professional awards this year!!! He’ll be presenting one of the plenary talks at the @amornith.bsky.social meeting in Amherst! 🥳🥳🥳

Congratulations to the 2026 AOS Early-career Award winners! Our 2026 James G. Cooper Award winners are Drs Devon DeRaad & Fengyi Guo. This year, the AOS awarded a Ned K Johnson Award to Dr Olivia M. Smith. These awardees will deliver plenary talks at #AOS26. americanornithology.org/aos-announce...

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog! A tangled trio: Rapid divergence and gene flow in the Buzzing Flowerpecker avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2026/05/13/a... Based on the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social paper by @devonderaad.bsky.social et al. | #ornithology

I'm looking to hire a postdoc. Please share if you can!

This semester I developed and taught a course on applied population genomics. Lab activities proceed from the basics of the command line and Git to variant calling with workflow managers and a suite of downstream analyses (e.g., ADMIXTURE). All materials can be found here: elinck.org/genomics_eco...

get your fresh hot highly contiguous Clark's Nutcracker genome here: doi.org/10.1093/g3jo... (lead by @peterinnes1.bsky.social & feat. @mdcarling.bsky.social)

Small migratory birds cross deserts and seas as part of their annual migration. But how? Our new study shows how thrush nightingales do it: by flying night after night and stopping during the day, when they remain innactive🐦➡️(1/3) doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... @royalsocietypublishing.org #BirdMigration

Wrote a fun little thing on gene tree discordance: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mzPI3QW8S...

Naming your biology LLM after Rosalind Franklin is… hell is not hot enough

My latest Digest for Evolution is now available online. One of my favorite pieces to write. 😉 Digest: Chance and necessity shape introgression patterns across three replicate avian hybrid zones academic.oup.com/evolut/advan... #ornithology

New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

👏 This year's winners of our Graduate Student Excellence Award have been selected - stay with us for the next few days to learn about their research. First is Anjali Gupta (@anjaligupta.bsky.social), PhD student at U. Kansas, researching genetic conflict. More on Anjali ⬇️ #society

I am SO grateful to my hardworking colleagues for creating this agreement. I know what it took. Proud to be a #Jayhawk, proud to be #UnionStrong. Ad astra!

Using coalescent demographic reconstructions, Zhou et al found that the extinct Baiji had undergone a bottleneck at the beginning of the Holocene but populations were recovering in the last 10,000 years until recent extinction from human activities doi.org/10.1038/ncom... #2026MMM #RIP

Our paper is on the cover of @currentbiology.bsky.social : a strawberry poison frog with the most common color morph, living up to its common name 🍓. In this issue, we uncover the genetic basis of color variation in frogs from Bocas del Toro, where blue, green, yellow, orange, and red morphs occur

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!) link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...

And now an empirical example: @devonderaad.bsky.social, @lhdecicco.bsky.social, @peterhosner.bsky.social and colleagues show how rapid divergence, gene-flow and stepping-stone island colonisation obscure phylogenetic relationships of buzzing flowerpeckers. (8/n) doi.org/10.1093/evol...

New special issue in Molecular Ecology on Conservation Genomics #popGen #evolution 🧪🧬🖥️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

BIG day for warbler genomes, with work led by @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social! Whole genomes nearly *every species* of warbler. Warblers the most "Pokémon" of the bird world? Well, they're also trading their coloration genes like valuable collectors cards ... www.psu.edu/news/eberly-... 🦉🧪

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What makes a mountaineer bird? We have published the first complete genome assembly for Redstarts (Genus: Phoenicurus), found across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Black redstarts genome has 30% repeats, second highest known in passerines. #genomics #ornithology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My 2nd dissertation chapter, entitled "Rapid divergence with gene flow creates intractable nodes in the tree of life: An empirical demonstration in the Buzzing Flowerpecker" will be in the forthcoming special issue of EJLS focused on phylogenomic discordance. Link: academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Just out in Systematic Biology, we explore the role of gene flow in island phylogeography of the Solomons Black-and-white Monarch complex. doi.org/10.1093/sysb... Up first, strong genetic structure between islands groups and weak (but present!) structure between Pleistocene-connected islands (🧵)

I mean, the title says it all: Genetic confirmation of an “uncommon mourningthroat” (Geothlypis philadelphia  ×  G. trichas): A rare but persistent hybrid warbler. Fun stuff with @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social and Kurt Gielow, OA in @wilsonornithsoc.bsky.social! 🦉 🧪 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Going to be a big month for warbler science! First out of the gates is @lannhiphung.bsky.social, with song & genomics of Nashville warblers. Eastern and western subspecies: non-overlapping and super distinct. Keep an eye on your life list 😉 🦉🧪@journal-evo.bsky.social academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Almost PhDone! I'll be giving my PhD exit seminar in the morning (Thursday), and defending on Friday.

Check out the latest paper from the CCGP on California Quail and the ecological and anthropogenic factors that impact genomic variation. Led by Phred Benham and the Bowie group: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🥳 My latest digest for Evolution is now available online! Digest: Postzygotic isolation barriers stabilize a hybrid zone between two grosbeak species academic.oup.com/evolut/advan... Original paper: academic.oup.com/evolut/advan... #ornithology

So great to have this work led by @devonderaad.bsky.social covered by an Evolution Digest!

Happy to share that our paper on the #evolution and #genomics of the most common #color polymorphism in #frogs is now out in @pnas.org! My favorite frogs even made the cover of this week’s issue! 🎉🐸🎉 Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Some species had an outsized role in shaping evolutionary theory. The Fiji Whistlers featured heavily in Ernst Mayr's development of the biological species concept and its application to allopatric taxa. In our new paper, we revisited this system with genomic data 🧵 doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Like woodpeckers? Or population genomics? Or three-species hybridization? Or selective sweeps? Then this is for you! The typeset version of "Evidence for ancient selective sweeps followed by differentiation among three species of Sphyrapicus sapsuckers" is published today: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

The paper for my R package is published! This has been a fun process learning more about hybrid zones and triangle plots. Thanks everyone who has contributed and tested it out already! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After a brief hiatus, the R package SNPfiltR is back on CRAN for easy installation (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...). Be sure to check out the documentation (devonderaad.github.io/SNPfiltR/ind...) to get ideas for the visualizations and filters you can use to better understand your SNP datasets!