Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The goal of my research program is to understand the neural and hormonal mechanisms that allow birds to appropriately adjust their behaviour on developmental, seasonal, and daily time scales. We explore how hormones and the brain regulate these behavioural changes, and how human-caused threats like contaminants, noise, and light pollution disrupt these processes. In the upcoming five years we will address two main research objectives. First, we will explore how the brain chemical serotonin modulates auditory attention. Songbirds use selective auditory attention when females seasonally attend to the mating songs of males, when males respond to the songs of a new territorial rival, or when young songbirds listen to the songs of adults during song learning. Second, we will explore how artificial light at night affects the brain and cognition of songbirds. Light at night causes health risks, and it also disrupts sleep and sleep-dependent processes like memory consolidation. We will test if light exposure at night disrupts sleep and memory formation in chickadees, who use spatial memory to remember the locations of stored food items during winter. Both lines of research will use experimental manipulations with captive birds to rigorously test how these processes may occur in birds in the wild. In addition to opening up new lines of basic research the work has applied outcomes, both informing conservation efforts to limit light pollution and furthering songbirds as a neurobiological model to study memory consolidation in sleep and the effects of sleep disruption.