Wesley Hochachka, BirdCast Alumnus Assistant Director of Bird Population Studies, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Wesley Hochachka is a senior research associate at Cornell University who has studied many aspects of the ecology and evolutionary biology of birds.  Much of his research has revolved around identifying patterns and inferring processes over long time periods or large spatial extents.  One of his current focuses is on the use of volunteer-collected (citizen science) data in order to understand the factors that determine where individual species live and why their distributions might change over time.  Much of this work is as a member of the team that works on the analyses of data from eBird and the Avian Knowledge Network.  The second current focus of his work is in disease ecology, as a member of a long-term collaboration that is studying the relationship between one finch species and a bacterial pathogen that jumped from poultry to these finches and subsequently caused substantial population declines in its new host.