Kimberly Rosvall, Professor of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, has been named the recipient of this year’s William Brewster Memorial Award, one of ornithology’s highest honors, recognizing the most meritorious body of work on North American birds published in the past decade.
The award is given annually by the American Ornithological Society, the largest professional organization of its kind in the world, with more than 3,000 active members who include research scientists, conservation practitioners, and students, spanning at least 60 countries.
Rosvall is widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on female aggression in non-human animals. Over more than a decade, she has published more than 65 papers examining the hormonal and neurobiological mechanisms that drive aggressive behavior in female birds, how those mechanisms differ from the ones long studied in males, and how they have evolved alongside other aspects of female biology.
That focus places Rosvall’s research at the center of a broader shift underway in evolutionary biology and ecology. For generations, the fields’ understanding of animal behavior leaned heavily on Charles Darwin’s conceptual framework of competitive males and choosy, nurturing females. Rosvall’s work is on the forefront of a sea change in these fields, demonstrating that female aggression is a trait with its own physiological underpinnings and evolutionary logic, which has implications for how birds adapt, or fail to adapt, to a rapidly changing world.
In addition, Rosvall is renowned for her broader scientific approach throughout the fields of organismal and behavioral biology, that is, the study of animals’ behavior, physiology, and interactions with their environments. In her research she integrates the “under the skin” mechanisms of physiology, neurobiology and genomics with the ecological and evolutionary questions of why behaviors exist in the first place.
Those two sides of biology, the how and the why, were historically studied in separate silos. Rosvall’s work in bringing them together has become a widely adopted model for researchers studying birds, behavior, climate change, and evolution.
She has also earned a reputation for ambitious, large-scale field experiments, including projects that involved physically rearranging birds’ nesting habitat to study how real-world competition shapes both behavior and physiology in the wild, and recent work examining how birds respond to a total solar eclipse.
“This recognition means so much because it validates a body of work that started with a simple question, why do we know so little about aggression in female animals, when we’ve studied it in males for a century?” Rosvall said. “I am especially grateful to my lab members, especially the ‘dream team’ of incredible grad students, undergraduates, and post-docs that make it so fun and rewarding to wonder and then quantitatively pursue the answers to consequential questions in biology.”
“Kim’s work has changed how an entire field understands the biology of female animals, at a moment when that understanding matters more than ever for predicting how species respond to a changing climate,” said Caroline Chick Jarrold, Interim Executive Dean of the College and Class of 1948 Herman B Wells Endowed Professor of Chemistry. “The Brewster Award reflects the rigor of her scholarship and its influence on science well beyond ornithology.”
The Brewster Award carries particular significance beyond Rosvall’s individual achievement, as it formally recognizes the growing understanding that female birds, from their behavior, to their physiology and evolutionary pressures, are essential to a complete picture of how birds function and adapt, rather than a secondary consideration to the study of males.
Rosvall’s lab at IU Bloomington studies wild, free-living birds, including tree swallows, drawing on tools from behavioral ecology, neuroendocrinology, evolutionary biology, physiology and genomics. Her recent projects have examined topics ranging from the physiological effects of heat waves on nesting birds to how avian behavior shifts during a solar eclipse.
The William Brewster Memorial Award has been given by the American Ornithological Society since 1921 to recognize an exceptional body of work on birds of the Western Hemisphere. Past recipients include some of the most influential figures in the field’s history.
The College of Arts