Courses

Lab Members

Jason Weir, Post-doctoral fellow

Natasha Bloch, Graduate student

Elizabeth Scordato, Graduate student email

David Wheatcroft, Graduate student email

Research

For a general overview of the research in my lab, see the departmental website. I have just completed a book on bird speciation. The current focus of my research is on the determinants of bird species diversity along the Himalayas, notably the question of why there are twice as many species in the eastern Himalayas as the west. This work is being done in collaboration with Dhananjai Mohan (email) and Pratap Singh (email) at the Wildlife Institute of India, as well as my long term (23 years!) collaborator Nitin Jamdar and his wife Kartika (email) . We are conducting extensive field studies of the ecology, abundance, elevational, and latitudinal distributions of passerine birds. We are working in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, mostly in the months April-July. Together with Bettina Harr of the Max Planck Institue in Ploen, Germany, we are generating mitochondrial DNA based phylogenies. The combination of phylogenetic and ecological work will be used to distinguish so-called ecological and historical explanations for the gradient in species diversity.

Selected publications (full list in pdf format)

FOR SUPPLEMENTS TO PUBLISHED PAPERS PLEASE GO HERE

1. Price, T. D., A. Qvarnström, and D. E. Irwin. (2003) The role of phenotypic plasticity in driving genetic evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 270:1433-1440. pdf
2. Price, T., J. Zee, K. Jamdar and N. Jamdar (2003) Bird species diversity along the Himalayas: a comparison of Himachal Pradesh with Kashmir. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 100: 394-409 pdf
3. Irwin, D. E., S. Bensch, J. H. Irwin and T. Price. (2005) Speciation by distance in a ring species. Science 307:414-415.pdf
4. Kelly, C., and T. D. Price (2005) Correcting for regression to the mean in behavior and ecology. American Naturalist 166: 700-707.pdf
5. Johansson, U. S., P. Alström, U. Olsson, P. Ericson, P. Lundberg and T. D. Price. (2007) Build-up of the Himalayan avifauna through immigration: a biogeographical analysis of the Phylloscopus and Seicercus warblers. Evolution 61: 324-333 pdf
6. Phillimore, A. B., and T. D. Price (2008) Density-dependent cladogenesis in birds. PLOS Biology. 6: e71 pdf

Graduate class in Ecological Genetics. Offered in alternate years, next will be Fall 2009. Most recent syllabus

Undergraduate class in Environmental Ecology (BIOS13107). Offered every winter. Most recent syllabus