Keynote speakers
Dr Mary Caswell Stoddard (Cassie)
Mary C. (Cassie) Stoddard is an evolutionary biologist and behavioural ecologist at Princeton University. She specialises on visual communication and signalling in birds, including egg mimicry among brood parasites and their hosts, and different strategies used by birds to help camouflage their eggs. The relationship between the structure and function of phenotypic traits in avian eggshells has also formed a key aspect of her research. Her recent findings to explain the shape of bird eggs were published in Science and received worldwide attention.
Her work incorporates techniques from physiology, mechanical engineering to comparative genomics. This research combines experiments in the lab and field, together with museum-based studies using extensive egg and nest collections.
Dr Charles Deeming
Charles Deeming is a principal lecturer at the University of Lincoln and specialises in avian and reptilian reproduction. His primary research explores the role of the nest within the incubation process and factors influencing the evolution and development of avian egg traits. He started working on aspects of bird incubation in the early 1980s and completed his postdoctoral studies on incubation effects on the sex and embryonic development of alligators. More recently, he has explored how egg shapes of birds, both past and present, might be associated with different nesting behaviours or incubation methods.
He has used his expertise to provide comprehensive scientific overviews of the diverse field of avian reproduction through his books, including “Avian incubation: behaviour, environment and evolution” and “Nests, eggs, and incubation: new ideas about avian reproduction”.
Douglas Russell
Douglas R. D. Russell is the Senior Curator at the Natural History Museum, London responsible for the Natural History Museum collection of Birds’ eggs and Nests. Working as part of a team of ornithologists in the Bird Group at Tring for the last 17 years, Douglas has been involved in research on topics as diverse as the evolution of eggshell appearance, penguin sexual behaviours Edwardian’s couldn’t handle and the history of egg collecting.
20 March 2018, The University of Sheffield
Dr Jim Reynolds
Jim Reynolds is a lecturer in Ornithology and Animal Conservation at the University of Birmingham where he works on the reproductive biology and the nutritional ecology of birds in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. He is interested in how birds obtain the raw materials for egg production with a particular focus on the functional significance of pigmentation in eggshells. His work has highlighted how anthropogenic food can have profound effects on the breeding biology of birds, including the composition of eggs, the growth trajectories of chicks and population stability.
As a leading authority on avian reproduction, he has helped to advance techniques particularly at the nest to understand the process of incubation within various ornithological contexts. He is an Associate Editor of the British Ornithologists’ Union journal Ibis and a co-editor of the Oxford University Press book entitled “Nests, eggs, and incubation: new ideas about avian reproduction”.
