Heather Williams (biologist)

Last updated
Heather Williams
Born1955 (age 6768)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Bowdoin College
Rockefeller University
Scientific career
Fields Ornithology
Institutions Williams College

Heather Williams (born 1955 in Spokane, Washington) is an American ornithologist, and professor at Williams College since 1988. [1] [2] She graduated from Bowdoin College with an A.B. in biology in 1977, from Rockefeller University with a Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1985, and was postdoctoral fellow, Field Research Center. She was a 1993 MacArthur Fellow. Williams' most notable work highlights bird song data [3] gathered on Kent Island, also known as the "Bowdoin Science Station".

Contents

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bowdoin College</span> Private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine

Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. When Bowdoin was chartered in 1794, Maine was still a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The college offers 35 majors and 40 minors, as well as several joint engineering programs with Columbia, Caltech, Dartmouth College, and the University of Maine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bird vocalization</span> Sounds birds use to communicate

Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs are distinguished by function from calls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jocelyn Bell Burnell</span> British astrophysicist

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Lack</span> British evolutionary biologist

David Lambert Lack FRS was a British evolutionary biologist who made contributions to ornithology, ecology, and ethology. His 1947 book, Darwin's Finches, on the finches of the Galapagos Islands was a landmark work as were his other popular science books on Life of the Robin and Swifts in a Tower. He developed what is now known as Lack's Principle which explained the evolution of avian clutch sizes in terms of individual selection as opposed to the competing contemporary idea that they had evolved for the benefit of species. His pioneering life-history studies of the living bird helped in changing the nature of ornithology from what was then a collection-oriented field. He was a longtime director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter and Rosemary Grant</span> Married couple of British evolutionary biologists

Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. Each currently holds the position of emeritus professor. They are known for their work with Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, one of the Galápagos Islands. Since 1973, the Grants have spent six months of every year capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples from finches on the island. They have worked to show that natural selection can be seen within a single lifetime, or even within a couple of years. Charles Darwin originally thought that natural selection was a long, drawn out process but the Grants have shown that these changes in populations can happen very quickly.

Christopher Miles Perrins, is Emeritus Fellow of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and Her Majesty's Warden of the Swans since 1993.

John Sterling Rockefeller was an American philanthropist, conservationist, and amateur ornithologist. He purchased Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy in order to establish a bird sanctuary, and later donated the island to Bowdoin College for use as a research station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Geller</span> American astronomer

Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.

Armand Marie Leroi is a New Zealand-born Dutch author, broadcaster, and professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London. He received the Guardian First Book Award in 2004 for his book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. He has presented scientific documentaries on Channel 4 such as Alien Worlds (2005) and What Makes Us Human (2006), and BBC Four such as What Darwin Didn't Know (2009), Aristotle's Lagoon (2010), and Secret Science of Pop (2012).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Homan Thorpe</span> British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist

William Homan Thorpe FRS was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a significant British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist. Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Patrick Bateson and Robert Hinde, Thorpe contributed to the growth and acceptance of behavioural biology in Great Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florence B. Seibert</span> American biochemist

Florence Barbara Seibert was an American biochemist. She is best known for identifying the active agent in the antigen tuberculin as a protein, and subsequently for isolating a pure form of tuberculin, purified protein derivative (PPD), enabling the development and use of a reliable TB test. Seibert has been inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame and the National Women's Hall of Fame.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornelia Clapp</span> American zoologist and educator (1849–1934)

Cornelia Maria Clapp was an American educator and zoologist, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, as well as its first female trustee. She was rated one of the top 150 zoologists in the United States in 1903, and her name was starred in the first five editions of American Men of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Athene Donald</span> British physicist

Dame Athene Margaret Donald is a British physicist. She is Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Timothy Robert Birkhead is a British ornithologist. He has been Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield since 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cecilia Heyes</span> British psychologist (born 1960)

Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy, and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marlene Zuk</span> American evolutionary biologist

Marlene Zuk is an American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She worked as professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) until she transferred to the University of Minnesota in 2012. Her studies involve sexual selection and parasites.

Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Megan Vaughan</span>

Megan Vaughan, is a British historian and academic, who specialises in the history of East and Central Africa. Since October 2015, she has been Professor of African History and Health at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. From 2002 to 2016 she was Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge.

Monique Deveaux is a Canadian philosopher. She is a Full Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Global Social Change at the University of Guelph. She is known for her research on poverty, cultural pluralism and global justice.

Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.

References

  1. "Williams Biology Faculty and Staff Williams". Archived from the original on 2010-12-30. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
  2. "She knows why the caged bird sings Heather Williams studies the secrets of bird song", The Boston Globe, M. R. Montgomery, August 26, 1993
  3. "The (Bird) Song Does Not Remain the Same". Kent Island. Retrieved 2022-09-28.