Professor, Biological Sciences
Dr. Kevin Omland’s article, “Female Song is Widespread and Ancestral in Songbirds,” published in Nature Communications in 2014 with a UMBC graduate student as lead author flipped the paradigm on how the original evolution of bird song is studied. Dr. Omland has published 14 additional peer-reviewed publications on this topic.
Dr. Omland served as one of the inaugural STRIDE fellows working on faculty diversity and recruitment. He served on STRIDE from 2015-2020. He also is involved in two National Science Foundation grants focused on diversity in the fields of ecology, evolution and environmental science.
Recent articles on gender, diversity and science include:
“Women Have Disrupted Research on Bird Song, and their Findings Show How Diversity Can Improve All Fields of Science,” The Conversation, September 11, 2020
For over 150 years scientists have believed that bird song was a male trait. This has been disproven over the past twenty years. As Dr. Omland points out in a recent article, the majority of researchers who discovered this mistake were women. This suggests that scientific research would benefit from including diverse groups of researchers with a range of perspectives. Click the photo to read the full article.