Kimberly Rosvall

I want to understand how behavioral evolution unfolds and why animals behave how they do. I love bold experiments that embrace the complexity of the natural world.

I began my career studying why females are aggressive, using large scale field experiments to induce territorial competition among cavity-nesting birds. Through analysis of the winners of such competition, I have integrated how and why questions in animal behavior, combining muddy boots field biology with endocrinology, neurobiology, and genomics. Recently, I have applied these tools to a new combination of age-old and emerging questions that extend my work into to macroevolution, range expansion, stress resilience, and the physiological mechanisms that facilitate these universal phenomena. My research group works entirely on free-living birds.