Congratulations to Dr. Laura McKinnon, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Welch Lab, on winning a 2013 L’Oreal Canada for Women in Science scholarship! Only 2 of these awards are given each year for all of the sciences throughout Canada. This truly exceptional award will be used to support Dr. McKinnon’s research on the ecology […]

Recent MSc graduate Chris Chen’s paper, “Hummingbirds can fuel flight completely with either exogenous glucose or fructose” was accepted for publication in Functional Ecology! This will be Chris’s first publication. Chris is currently pursuing his PhD in the Hood Lab at York University. Here is a brief summary of the paper’s findings and importance: Hovering on a high fructose diet A ruby-throated hummingbird […]

Professor Ted Garland Collaborator and colleague Ted Garland, from the University of California, Riverside is featured in the first episode of “Fail Lab”. “Fail Lab” is an educational video series aimed at teens that takes a fast-paced, humorous look at unusual events as a means of illustrating scientific theory. You can learn more about “Fail Lab” […]

A lab publication led by Dr. Welch and featuring the BIOD98 (Directed Research in Biology course) work of Amina Allalou, Prateek Sehgal, and Jason Cheng was recently accepted for publication in PLOS ONE. The paper, titled, “Glucose transporter expression in an avian nectarivore: the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris).” was co-authored with UTSC lecturer Aarthi Ashok. […]

I’m sorry for taking so long to post these…but here you go. This year’s research trip to Brazil took place May-June. With an earlier start in the year, we hoped to catch additional species that were already gone when we showed up in 2012. For the most part, we were successful. We worked with hummingbirds […]

Welcome to new postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Laura McKinnon. Laura is the recipient of a prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and arrives August 1st. Laura will be studying the effects of climate change on arctic shorebird nestling physiology and ecology.

Recent MSc graduate Sajeni Mahalingam’s paper, “Neuromuscular control of hovering wingbeat kinematics in response to distinct flight challenges in the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Biology! This will be Sajeni’s first publication. Sajeni is currently pursuing her PhD in the Scott Lab at McMaster University.

New lab publication: “Very low force-generating ability and unusually high temperature dependency in hummingbird flight muscle fibers” in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Congratulations to PhD student Derrick Groom on being awarded a prestigious NSERC PGSD Postgraduate Scholarship! This funding will support Derrick for the coming three years as he continues his PhD thesis work.

Congratulations to lab member Derrick Groom on his successful transfer to the Cell & Systems Biology PhD program!