Benjamin Van Doren: Sept 15th 

Bird migration in a changing and urbanized world

Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Summary: Dr. Benjamin Van Doren studies the responses of migratory birds to environmental change. His research spans spatial and population scales and unites ecology, evolution, behavior, and conservation. Dr. Van Doren earned a PhD in Zoology from Oxford University, and he has received achievement awards from the American Ornithological Society, Linnean Society of London, and Zoological Society of London. Dr. Van Doren recently joined the University of Illinois as a faculty member in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, where he leads the Migration Biology Lab. The lab’s recent work focuses on how light pollution and human-dominated landscapes influence migratory birds’ ecology and behavior, and how new machine learning techniques and modeling approaches are pushing ecology forward while facilitating opportunities for conservation action.