Postdoc University of California, Berkeley
PhD Cornell University
AB Dartmouth College
Dustin is a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist who studies the causes and consequences of sociality in animals. He is interested in social behavior, mating systems, and sexual selection among other topics. He currently works primarily on African starlings at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and snapping shrimp throughout the Caribbean. He has conducted fieldwork throughout Africa and Central America, as well as in the Galapagos Islands working on birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and crustaceans. He combines intensive field work and modeling with a variety of lab techniques, including molecular genetics, endocrinology, immunology, and stable isotope analysis. Dustin received an AB from Dartmouth College in 1999, followed by a year in the Galapagos Islands as a Reynolds Scholar conducting independent research. He received his PhD in 2006 as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a Miller Research Fellow. In 2009, he joined the faculty at Columbia University.
Diploma Kenya Wildlife Service Training Institute
Wilson has been working on the African starling project since 2001. He left for a year and a half in 2006 to complete his Diploma in Wildlife Management at the Kenya Wildlife Service Training Institute. He has also been an integral part of many of the collection trips that we conducted across Kenya to collect starlings.
Godffrey grew up not far from Mpala and began working on the African starling project 2007 after graduating from high school. He monitors superb starling populations annually and works closely with undergraduate and graduate students in the field on a variety of projects.
Research Associates
Former Students and Postdocs
High School Students
Principal Investigator
Dustin Rubenstein
Wilson Nderitu
Godffrey Manyaas
Rubenstein Lab
behavior • ecology • evolution
Graduate Students
James Kealey
MA Columbia University
BA University of California, Berkeley
James studied the ecology and genomics of caste differentiation in sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp using next generation sequencing and field experiments in Panama.
Melissa Mark
Sara Keen
MA Columbia University
MS University of Florida
BS University of Florida
Sara studied vocal communication and the mechanisms of kin recognition in cooperatively breeding superb starlings. She found that starlings encode identity information in flight calls and that social groups use different calls.
Undergraduate Students
Jeremy Law
Caitlin Dean
BA Columbia University
Caitlin studied the relationship between superb starling nest site selection and acacia ant aggressiveness. She found that starlings prefer to nest in trees inhabited by the most aggressive species of ants. She also examined avian diversity in agroforestry landscape with shade coffee plantations in Nicaragua.
MA candidate Columbia University
BA Columbia University
Jeremy studied mechanisms of kin recognition in sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp. His field trials in Panama showed that different species respond differently to hetero- and conspecifics, and potentially use different mechanisms to recognize kin.
Kathleen Apakupakul
MA Columbia University
MS University of Michigan
BS John Hopkins University
Kathleen studied extrapair paternity and differences in patterns of sexual selection in male and female superb starlings. She also examined MHC variation and mate choice in this cooperatively breeding species.
Rebecca Kelley
MA Columbia University
BA University of Miami, Ohio
Rebecca helped develop techniques to study epigenetics in birds. Specifically, she studied DNA methylation of promoter of the avian glucocorticoid receptor in superb starlings.
Joseph Solomon
MS Hunter College
BA Oberlin College
Joe helped develop microsatellite markers in sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp and analyzed corticosterone stress hormones in superb starlings and other birds. He is now doing bioinformatic work on the genomics of caste differentiation in snapping shrimp.
Gillian Carling
Columbia College ’17
The Bronx High School of Science ’13
Gillian is a Senior at the Bronx High School of Science and working in the lab as part of their Biological and Physic al Research Projects Mentorship Program. She is studying sex determination, hermaphroditism, and sociality in sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp using scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
Rubenstein Lab, Spring 2012. The picture on the left depicts the group in New York City. The picture on the right depicts the group in Kenya.
Kaitlyn Gaynor
BA Columbia University
Kaitlyn is helping to develop and optimize microsatellite markers in sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp to study the role of kin selection and reproductive conflict in the evolution of complex social behavior. She also uses SEM to sex these tiny creatures.
Sarah Guindre-Parker
PhD program Columbia University (started Fall 2012)
MS Windsor University
BA Simon Fraser University
Sarah is interested in the evolution of animal behavior and how ecological and physiological factors may influence reproduction in birds. During her MS, she examined male plumage signals of individual quality and their influence on reproductive success in an Arctic passerine. As an undergraduate, she studied physiology and immunology in birds. For her PhD, she is interested in studying the physiological and environmental costs of reproduction that may favor cooperative breeding behavior across several species of African starlings that differ in their degree of cooperation during breeding.
BA Columbia University
Lea studied female dispersal and recruitment patterns in cooperatively breeding superb starlings. She found that immigrant females commonly recruit female relatives into their new groups, thereby creating kin structure within the immigrant population.
PhD Program Tufts University
BA Columbia University
Julia studied the form and function of song in male and female superb starlings to look at patterns of dimorphism in this tropical species. She found that both sexes use and produce song in the same ways, suggesting that song is under strong selection in both sexes.
Julia Pilowsky
Lea Pollack
Postdoc Columbia University
PhD Stony Brook University
BA University of California, Santa Cruz
Melissa studied the physiological and fitness costs of brood parasitism by cuckoos in Thryothorus wrens in an agro-forest landscape in Nicaragua. She was funded by an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
Lucia Weinman
Columbia College ’14
Lucy will be using the superb starling transcriptome to develop a SNP array. We will use the SNPs to study parentage and relatedness is our longterm study population of starlings and begin to ask new questions about landscape-level kin structure with these more powerful markers.
Elora Lopez
Columbia College ’15
Elora is helping to develop microsatellite markers to study kin structure in 20 species of snapping shrimp with different social systems.
Hannah Skolnik
Columbia College ’15
Hannah will be developing epigenetic tools of use in zebra finches. Specifically, she will adapt our work on DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor promoter in starlings to the lab rat of the avian world. She will then compare methylation patterns in different brain regions and other tissues.
Columbia College ’15
Eshwar is helping to genotype our longterm study population of superb starlings and to develop microsatellite markers to study kinship in 20 species of snapping shrimp with different social systems.
Brahadheeshwar Sundararaju
Laura Booth
Columbia College ’15
Laura is helping to develop microsatellite markers to study kin structure in 20 species of snapping shrimp with different social systems.
