We would like to congratulate Dr. Jenny Ouyang, Associate Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno for receiving a U.S. Fulbright Scholar fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year. She was a previous NSF EPSCoR RII Track-4 recipient for her research on understanding how animals adapt to urban environments. Dr. Ouyang said “the EPSCoR grant allowed me to set up the field sites currently used in my research to understand how urbanization impacts behavior, physiology, and fitness in birds. We found notable differences between urban and rural individuals, such that I am very keen on seeing if these differences would be similar in the tropics, which is the research topic of my Fulbright.”

Her Fulbright fellowship is part of her yearlong sabbatical where she’ll focus on researching birds, mainly house wrens, in various locations, both rural and urban, across the globe to see if the same behavioral patterns emerge that she has observed in northern Nevada. Upon completion of her research, she’s hoping to find how we can change cities to benefit human and animal health. Ouyang will be examining the effects of pollutants, such as city light, noise and heavy metals to see how we can make cities more livable.