Devon DeRaad

New #rstats package: hybridclock dates hybrid populations beyond F2, with or without a genetic map, with calibrated intervals. Validated on 23 datasets, from F1s to 56 generations. Tutorial on five real datasets: paulmaier.github.io/hybridclock #popgen #hybridization

Diversification of barn owls in the Western Hemisphere: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... A new study suggests that barn owls spread to the continental Americas from the Caribbean, and reached the Galápagos two separate times! 🪶🧪 (📷 @minzhao-aves.bsky.social et al.)

This year's taxonomic update of North American birds is out! There are a host of exciting new splits and other rearrangements, including changes to Willets, Marsh Wren, Great Egret, and Yellow Warbler. Plus, Guatemala's first endemic bird species! americanornithology.org/split-decisi... #ornithology

Happy to be part of this collaboration: Advancing Marine Mammal Conservation Through Omics Tools and Integration of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I’m really happy to share that my invited review on social insect genome evolution, co-authored with @corriemoreau.bsky.social, is out now in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social 🐝🐜 This is the paper I wish I’d had when studying for quals in grad school, and was a ton of fun to write.

I’m excited to share the 🌷🪻 "meadow plot" 🌻🌷, a new pop genomics visualization tool I created to ID putative selective sweeps across the genome using windowed π & FST estimates from pixy. User-friendly tutorial here: paigeduffin.github.io/meadow_plot_... Please help spread the word by sharing! 🧬

I'm hiring a postdoc to help build tools for inferring complex speciation histories with genomic data. strong computational skills are a must, but this is a training opportunity. 60K$+ salary, 2 years, details flexible. please reach out! (and repost) ad here: jobs.montana.edu/postings/53150

V happy about this one (@brentcemerson.bsky.social @biodiversitysmns.bsky.social @hernmoral.bsky.social)et al Species have survived on oceanic islands for Mya despite occupying small geographic areas, facing environmental calamities and having low Ne. We discuss this w/ a focus on conservation. 1/2

USDA approves blight resistant chestnut trees. www.newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/202...

Come work here, it is a fun place and we would love to have you as our colleague: careers.amnh.org/postings/4923 #Lepidoptera #Insect #Entomology #AMNH

SO PROUD! @brynnjohnson13.bsky.social’s paper on temp dependent competition in secondary contact zones in darters is ofFISHally out in @journal-evo.bsky.social academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... As an extra hurrah related to this work, I had the opportunity to paint a corresponding journal cover!

New paper in Systematic Biology! We show how micro-synteny can help resolve a tricky fish #phylogenetic problem where traditional sequence-based analyses fall short. Genomes archive evolutionary history in more than just their basepairs. doi.org/10.1093/sysb... #fish #genomics #evolution

Now with issue number etc. And we got the cover!

Whatever else was wrong with the United States, we truly did have a higher education system that was the envy of the world. Now we’re lighting it on fire because some people are bored and racist.

This dude gets it @devonderaad.bsky.social #AOS26

(1/4) Really excited that the first analysis of my PhD was published in Proceedings B! After analyzing half a million bird banding records across 92 species from @instbirdpop.bsky.social, we found lower female survival in 35 passerine species. doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Congratulations Violet Onsongo on her new #dragonfly paper! Evolution and biogeography of the widespread dragonfly genus Orthetrum (Odonata: Anisoptera: Libellulidae): Massive dispersal in the tertiary - Systematic Entomology - Wiley Online Library resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Y and W sex chroms are enigmatic. Compared to the rest of the genome, they show distinct structure and diversity, and are notoriously difficult to assemble. Work led by @mdalikova.bsky.social investigates these patterns for the W chromosome of silkworm, Bombyx mori www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

grateful to have received the lab's first NSF grant to study cyclical processes of speciation with new theory and tools (applied to Melanesian birds). ad to come, but I'll be looking for a postdoc with computational biology chops—please reach out! (and repost) www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

SOO excited to share this news!!!! @devonderaad.bsky.social is an amazing scientist and is going to build a stellar lab at AMNH!!

Interested in joining a growing lab in LA? We’re hiring a postdoc!! Please spread the word to folks in your network and feel free to get in touch with any questions recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF11142

Excited to say that I will be starting as the Curator of Ornithology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History this fall! I can't wait to work with the newly renovated collection and continue my research program back in the Great Lakes. (1/3)

Feeling very fortunate to begin this next chapter @smithfellows.bsky.social . Thank you to everyone who invested their time, guidance, and encouragement along the way. Looking forward to the work ahead. www.kent.edu/esdri/news/k...

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...