Dr. Elsie Shogren is an assistant professor at Wake Forest University. Whether it’s hours watching behavior in the field or hours troubleshooting genomic analyses, she is excited to put in the time to learn something new about how evolution, ecology, and behavior interact to shape species – especially birds!
Elsie discovered birds were awesome while getting her B.Sc. at Cornell University. After assisting others with their field work for a few years, she got her Ph.D. at Kansas State University with Alice Boyle, studying how natural and sexual selection interact to shape evolution of manakins. She jumped into speciation genomics as an NSF Rules of Life postdoctoral fellow with Al Uy at the University of Rochester before joining the faculty at Wake Forest University in 2025.
Avani Salunkhe is a first year PhD student in the Shogren Lab. She found her love for birds (and asking questions about them!) in high school when she volunteered at the National Aviary. Avani completed her undergraduate degree at Penn State, where she studied an association between a gene and migration direction in Vermivora warblers in the Toews Lab. She’s loved the fieldwork she has assisted in, and she has also dabbled in genomic offset mapping and territory mapping of birds throughout her undergraduate degree.
Avani is super excited to explore questions about birds, behavior, and genomics here at Wake! In her spare time, you’ll find her birding, hiking, or embroidering some piece of clothing.
John Yoo is a Master’s student in the Shogren Lab. John is fascinated by the beauty and diversity of birds and is excited to use genomics to learn about their evolution! He dreams of shearwaters and eiders and enjoys indoctrin— err, educating others about the joy of birding.
John was inspired to pursue bird research by the esteemed Dr. Karan Odom during his B.Sc. at the University of the Pacific. There, he studied how hormones affect female song in house wrens. After doing some fieldwork with ruffed grouse and northern bobwhite, he started at Wake Forest in 2025.
Megan Zanni is a sophomore in the Shogren Lab. She’s loved animals ever since she was little, and in recent years she’s been especially awed by birds (particularly raptors)! This is Megan’s first research lab, and she’s very excited to have the opportunity to study birds with biologists who love them as much as she does.
When she’s not researching birds, you can find Megan studying English and art history. In her free time, she’s typically reading, writing, talking (loudly) about movies, and worrying that she should go back to studying.
Lion Liang is a sophomore student in the Shogren Lab. He had always been fascinated by these flying creatures that seemed not to be constrained by the ground, and he deepened his interest in birds through several birding trips and a field biology course he took in his freshman year. Lion is curious about many aspects of avian biology and is always excited to learn more about it, meanwhile he is still exploring his potential research direction.
Outside the lab, Lion loves being in nature and enjoys activities related to it, going for a bird walk in the woods, climbing boulders, or just staying with trees.
Elsie H. Shogren, PhD 