Meet the team

The barn swallow project is based at the University of Colorado, but involves collaboration between scientists from all over the world. Here are some of the people working on data collection and analysis.

Dr. Rebecca Safran, Principal Investigator
The University of Colorado, Boulder

Becca is in charge of this project. An associate professor at CU, Becca has been studying barn swallows in the U.S. since her graduate work at Cornell. After working for years on sexual selection, physiology, and mate choice behavior, she became interested in how these processes contribute to population divergence. Becca received a prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to work on this project, which is where all our funding is coming from. Read more about Becca here.

Dr. Elizabeth Scordato, Assistant Professor
California Polytechnic University, Pomona

Liz joined the Safran lab after receiving her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and was a postdoc on the barn swallow project from 2012 - 2017.  Liz is now an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly, Pomona. Read more about Liz here.

Dr. Nolan Kane, genomics collaborator
The University of Colorado

Nolan is a evolutionary biologist, bioinformatics wizard, and assistant professor at the University of Colorado. His lab focuses on the genomic basis of domestication in plants, but he also helps us with bioinformatics analysis of our barn swallow genomic data. 

Dr. Liu Yu, Collaborator
Beijing Normal University, China

Liu Yu was a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University, London and conducted his dissertation work on sexual selection in northern Chinese population of barn swallows. He accompanied Liz on the 2014 and 2015 field seasons in China, and also worked with Becca and Sheela in the field during the 2017 field season. Liu Yu is conducing population studies in his hometown of Shuangyashan to try and determine what traits are targets of female preferences in the H. r. gutturalis subspecies. 

Dr. Georgy Semenov, Postdoctoral Fellow
The University of Colorado

Georgy is a Russian collaborator who worked on the trans-Siberian trip in 2013 and Mongolia in 2014. Georgy's own research is focused on causes and consequences of hybridization between members of the white wagtail subspecies complex, and he visited Colorado in the fall of 2014 to learn genomics analysis for his research on this system. He has recently joined our lab as a postdoc working on both wagtails and barn swallows! Read more about Georgy here.

Dr. Matthew Wilkins, postdoctoral fellow
Vanderbilt University

Matt was a PhD student in Becca's lab. He studied variation in song- no easy feat in barn swallows, which rarely hold still long enough to get good recordings. He has worked on swallows in Colorado, Turkey, Romania, Israel, and Taiwan, and spent the summer of 2013 on the trans-Siberian sampling expedition. He's also responsible for many of the excellent bird photos on this site. Matt is now a postdoc at Vanderbilt University. Read more about Matt here.