Dr. Dai Shizuka, Principal Investigator (he/him)

Current Lab Members:

Dr. Allison Johnson, Research Assistant Professor (she/her)

Dr. Allison Johnson is a Research Assistant Professor. She first joined our lab as a postdoc. She is currently funded as a PI on her NSF grant on ecogeography of cooperative breeding systems in Australian fairywrens. She is broadly interested in cooperative breeding, heterospecific sociality, long-term data, and avian ecology. She is also the co-founder of fairywrenproject.org. Visit her website here.

Aidan Hand, Lab Manager (he/him)

Aidan started working in the lab in 2023 as a junior Biological Sciences major at UNL with a focus on ecology, evolution, and animal behavior. He went on to conduct a senior thesis looking at the survivorship of birds involved in the winter projects at Reller Prairie. After graduating with Honors with Distinction, he became our project manager for our 2025-26 season.

Faiza Hafeez, Ph.D. Student (she/her)

Faiza Hafeez joined the lab as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2020. She came in having already attained two Masters degrees, one in Wildlife Ecology from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, and one in Psychology from University of Buffalo. She is working on unraveling the function of vocal communication networks in birds in the wild!

Brandy Williams, Ph.D. Student (she/her)

Brandy Williams joined our lab in Fall 2022. She graduated from University of Missouri in Spring 2022. She won a Turner Award from the Animal Behavior Society in 2022 and a Resilience NRT fellowship from UNL. She is interested in various aspects of avian behavior, including ecological and evolutionary implications of extraordinary parental investment such as distraction displays.

Angela Brierly, Ph.D. Student (she/her)

Angela Brierly joined our lab in Fall 2023. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from University of California, Santa Cruz and was the field project manager for our long-term study on Golden-crowned Sparrows in 2021-2022. She is an NSF GRFP fellow (!). Her dissertation will explore the feedback between social networks and physiology in winter resident birds.

Sarah Beres, Ph.D. student (she/her)

Sarah Beres joined our lab in Fall 2024 as a co-advised student with Dr. Allison Johnson. She graduated from Eckerd College in 2022 where she studied stress-induced infanticide in Black Skimmers. After doing point-count surveys in the backcountry of Oregon and norther California, she studied territoriality, social dynamics between sexes and kin neighborhoods in the Florida Scrub-Jay. She is interested in cooperation and territoriality in fairyrwens.  

Hannah Landwerlen, MS student (she/her)

Hannah Landwerlen joined the lab in 2025 as a co-advised Masters student with Dr. Allison Johnson. She came in as the most experienced field ornithologists we’ve ever had! She will be working on projects related to dispersal patterns in fairywrens in Australia.

Undergraduate Students:

Darian Pierre (he/him)

Darian is a Fisheries & Wildlife major at UNL. He joined the lab in Fall 2023 after having taken Dr. Allison Johnson’s Field Avian Biology course at Cedar Point Biological Station in the summer. He is also involved in various aspects of the winter project at Reller Prairie and is getting hands on experience with bird banding and running field experiments.

Alexis Mendez (he/him)

Alexis started at UNL in Fall 2023, majoring in Computer Science. He conducted work over the summer before his first year at through the UNL STEM-POWER program. He prototyped our insulated roost box design, which we are planning to deploy this winter!

Praneetha Thutika (she/her)

Praneethat began working in the lab from the start of her Freshman year at UNL majoring in Biology. She is the new main lab tech for the DNA work in the lab.

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Lab Alumni:

Graduate Students and Postdocs:

Quentin Smith

Quentin Smith joined Kate Lyon’s lab and our lab as a co-advised Master’s student in Fall 2021. His Master’s thesis applied network methods to understand the process of community assembly using paleontological records from Halls Cave, TX. He is a Ph.D. student at Indiana University starting in Fall 2024.

Annie Madsen (Ph.D., 2023)

Dr. Annie Madsen earned her B.S. and Ph.D. in Biology at UNL. She was funded throughout her Ph.D. by the Resilience NRT program . Her dissertation explored how animal culture and long-term dynamics of social networks influence populations and communities, using our long-term data on Golden-crowned sparrows. She is now an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. de Silva at UCSD. Here is her website.

Laura Vander Meiden (Ph.D., 2023)

Dr. Laura Vander Meiden received her Ph.D. in 2023. Her research focused on on heterospecific interactions in the context of mixed-species flocks. During her Ph.D., she also did an internship with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Feeder Watch program. She is pretty much responsible for setting our lab on a trajectory towards studying interspecific sociality. She is now a data analyst at Cornell University.

Dr. Eli Strauss (Postdoc, 2019-2020)

Dr. Eli Strauss was a PoE Postdoc from 2019-2020. He came to us from the Holekamp Lab at MSU, where he completed his Ph.D. in Spring 2019. He is now spending time as Humboldt Postdoc with Damien Farine and Max Planck postdoc at the Ecology of Animal Societies group. He is now an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University . Check out his research on his website here.

Maria Goller (Ph.D. 2020)

Dr. Maria Goller finished her Ph.D. on evolution and function of vocal mimicry in May 2020. Her dissertation explored (i) the evolutionary origins of vocal mimicry in songbirds, and (ii) the diversity and use of mimicked notes in starling songs.

Matt Wilkins (Postdoc: 2014-2016)

Dr. Matt Wilkins was a PoE postdoc and and Shizuka Lab postdoc and innovated the phenotype network approach to studying multi-component signal traits. Matt went on to a stint as a postdoc at Vanderbilt University Center for Science Outreach. He is the founder of the innovative education studio, Galactic Polymath.

Emily Hudson (Ph.D. 2018)

Dr. Emily Hudson was the first Ph.D. student in our lab. She finished her Ph.D. on December 2018. Her dissertation revealed details of early song recognition in nestling Golden-crowned Sparrows. She went on to be a postdoc in the Creanza Lab at Vanderbilt University. She now works as a data scientist and is based in Minneapolis.

Lab/Project Managers:

Traysea Malama-Auger, (Lab Manager 2024-2025)

Traysea Malama-Auger worked as our lab manager from August 2024 – 2025 after graduating from Florida State University. Her job entailed coordinating the winter birds project, conducting field work, organizing data, coordinating undergraduate student work, building a lot of feeders and antennas, and kept the lab running. She is now a Ph.D. student at Cornell.

Carly Trebac (Lab Manager, 2023-2024)

Carly Trebac was an honors student at UNL and graduated as a Dean’s Scholar in 2023. She then became a field assistant for our fairwren project and subsequently became our lab manager until August 2024. She is now studying environmental law at Georgetown University.

Julia Chase (Golden-crowned Sparrow Project manager, 2022-2023)

Julie ran the sparrow project in our 2022-2023 season–the last year we had funding for a field manager. She coordinated numerous undergrad interns, banded all the birds in the arboretum, and organized the heck out of our data. She got her BA from Wellesley College and Masters at University of Exeter. She is now a Ph.D. student at University of Stirling.

Mary de Aquino (Golden-crowned Sparrow Project manager, 2020-2021)

Mary worked on the sparrow project as an undergrad at UCSC and became our intrepid project manager that got the Golden-crowned Sparrow Project through the first year of the COVID pandemic. She coordinated numerous interns and carried out a massive social learning field experiment in close coordination with Annie Madsen. She went on to do more field assistantships and then became a Ph.D. student at University of Wyoming.

Undergraduate Alumni

Furqan Mahdi

Furqan Mahdi (class of 2024) started working in the lab in Fall 2020 as a First Year Research Experience (FYRE) fellow and now has continued on with funding from Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience (UCARE) fellowship. She worked on extracting behavior data from videos for two different projects, and led the DNA work in the lab. She is a Biosystems Engineering major. She is currently an INBRE fellow working on biomedical research.

Yasmin Worth

Yasmin Worth (class of 2025) is a member of our inaugural class of Upward Bound Math Science (UBMS) Research Bridge Program (now the STEM-POWER program). She graduated from North Star High School in Lincoln, NE in May 2021 and jumped right into working in our lab. She worked. on various video extraction projects, and now she is working in the Dog Cognition lab at UNL. She is Pre-Vet.

Brynna Oxley

Brynna (undergraduate researcher 2024-2025) worked on various projects including video coding of behavior, building RFID antennas, and sound analysis. She is now a Masters student at University of South Dakota.

Sagan Smith

Sagan graduated as a Conservation Biology major at UNL. They worked in the lab from 2021-2024 on a variety of projects, but they often functioned as the *point* person for projects related to soundscapes and sound analysis. They also worked on an independent project to assess the detectability of our RFID-enabled feeders on multiple species, which became part of a research paper (currently in review).

Nolan Rokke

Nolan graduated as a Fisheries & Wildlife major at UNL in May 2024. He joined the lab in Fall 2023 after having taken Dr. Allison Johnson’s Field Avian Biology course at Cedar Point Biological Station in the summer. He was involved in various aspects of the winter project at Reller Prairie and is getting hands on experience with bird banding and running field experiments. He is now off to doing field jobs in Montana and Australia for the rest of 2024!

Sophia Maizo

Sophia (undergraduate researcher, 2022-2023). Sophia extracted much of the video data from our social learning field experiment on Golden-crowned Sparrows (headed by Annie Madsen)! She graduated from UNL in December 2023.

Brady Pham

Brady Pham (undergraduate researcher, 2020-2021) worked in the lab on coding video data. He is now in a Masters program on Public Health at Columbia University

Kris Hans

Kris received funding from the UNL UCARE research fellowship to conduct work on winter ecology of birds using our new RFID feeder system.

Arich Knaub

Arich graduate with a major in Math and minor in Biology in Spring 2019. He now teaches math in high school.

Bridget Bickner

Briget worked as lab technician running various DNA analyses. She is now a Ph.D. student at Harvard with Dr. Robin Hopkins.