Our plenary speakers for the American Ornithological Society (AOS) 2024 meeting include two invited speakers and winners of the 2024 AOS Early Professional Awards (to be announced soon!). These speakers highlight modern, cutting-edge approaches to ornithological science and the conservation of birds, and also showcase the diversity of the people doing this important work as well as the birds that they study.
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Invited Plenaries
Liba Pejchar, Ph.D.
Professor and conservation scientist, Colorado State University
“Island birds and equity in a changing world“
Island birds are often weird and wonderful. Yet, their unique adaptations to isolated places also make them particularly vulnerable to extinction. Dr. Pejchar will talk about her unconventional path to island conservation, and what she has learned from the birds in the Pacific Islands, including their critical roles in sustaining ecosystems. These projects, in collaboration with landowners and students, have led her to center both biodiversity and human well-being in her research and teaching. She will talk about how this perspective continues to shape her group’s science, including efforts to advance equity and justice in ecology and conservation.
Liba Pejchar is a professor and conservation scientist in the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University (CSU). Before joining CSU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and earned a B.A. from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services in the places where people live and work. Among other projects, she and her students study the loss and recovery of birds on invasion-prone Pacific islands, and innovative ways to sustain nature and human well-being in agroecosystems and areas undergoing residential and energy development. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society in 2014, and is also honored to have received conservation impact and graduate student mentoring awards from CSU. Dr. Pejchar just returned from an adventurous sabbatical year with her family—six months in Helsinki, Finland, and three months in Naples, Italy.
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Dai Shizuka, Ph.D.
Associate professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
“Our social worlds: The importance of relationships in the lives of birds and the people who study them“
Dr. Shizuka’s research explores questions about the power of social relationships in the ecology and evolution of birds. How does sociality influence individual-level behavior such as space use and foraging strategies? How do challenging times reveal underlying social dynamics? And how social relationships influence how birds learn from and communicate with each other? Of course, sociality matter to ornithologists as well: Our work and professional identities are shaped by the social relationships we foster within and outside the social organizations to which we belong. These social factors may be particularly important for ornithologists from historically excluded communities. In this talk, Dr. Shizuka connects threads between his research on the social lives of birds and his ongoing collaborative project to address how the social and cultural environment of societies can play a positive role in providing support, empowerment, and a sense of belonging to ornithologists from diverse backgrounds.
Dai Shizuka earned his B.A. in Biology at Brown University, and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Wyoming, a Visiting Scholar at Rikkyo University in Japan, and Chicago Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at University of Chicago. He was hired as Research Assistant Professor at School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2012, became Assistant Professor in 2015, and earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2021. His research program explores the role of social behavior in animal ecology and evolution, and his work often integrates diverse topics such as network theory, cognition, life history theory, and species interactions. He became an Elective Member of the AOS in 2016, and Fellow in 2021. He is a member of the AOS Council, co-chair of the AOS Diversity and Inclusion Committee and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) BIO-LEAPS grant to co-create affinity groups within ornithology. His spark bird was the Cedar Waxwing, which he captured as an intern at a banding station.
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