The dynamics of bird plumage with evolutionary biologist Dr. Erin Morrison!

A monthly conversation examining creatures, ecology, writing, film, music, art, science and pop culture, using three primary mediums: doodles, writing, and speech. Hosted by Juliana, she talks with documentary film makers, musicians and activists leading global protests.

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This month Juliana speaks with Dr. Erin Morrison, evolutionary biologist and Clinical Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at NYU, about how colors are produced in birds and how we can re-think the ways we study and name birds.

Conversations With Animals is a monthly conversation hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with animal lives. Subscribe here: animal.julianaroth.com

Morrison is an evolutionary biologist who studies how the developmental architecture of a trait influences its patterns of diversification. She particularly focuses on how the structure of metabolic pathways drive phenotypic changes. Morrison’s current research includes investigating the diversification of avian carotenoid metabolic pathways that underlie plumage coloration as well as the role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of metabolic pathways in photosynthetic eukaryotes, such as plants and red algae. Her work has been published in the journals Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, Nature Communications, Evolution, American Naturalist, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Biology Direct, Integrative and Comparative Biology, and Journal of Avian Biology.

Prior to joining NYU, Morrison was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History.

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Juliana is a writer, professor, filmmaker, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. A 2022-23 Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, she currently teaches writing at NYU.⁠