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PhD Candidate Brittany Coppinger Receives Awards for Research

PhD student Brittany Coppinger recently received two awards for a research project involving social and communicative complexity in avian populations. One award is a student research grant from the Animal Behavior Society, a professional organization “dedicated to promoting and advancing the scientific study of animal behavior.” The second award is the Werner and Hildegard Hesse Award, a nationally competitive award from the American Ornithology Society.

Brittany Coppinger is working toward a PhD in experimental psychology in the Department of Psychology, where she works with Prof. Todd Freeberg in the Comparative Communication Laboratory. Her research project, “Flock density and its influences on social and vocal complexity,” focuses on using Carolina chickadees as a model system for testing how social complexity influences variation in communicative complexity. This research, which is the final project for her dissertation, will begin in the fall.