This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2025. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to biology in innovative ways. Understanding how bird species adapt to their environment is crucial to knowing how they may be affected by our rapidly changing world. Examples of adaptations include metabolic changes for high altitude survival and cryptic camouflage to remain inconspicuous in various environments. Changes in the genome are often the driving force for these adaptations. These changes range from a single DNA base pair, to more complex structural genetic changes, which can be fifty to thousands of base pairs long. These longer and more complex structural genetic changes are more likely to overlap with genes, leading to changes in DNA function. However, we do not know exactly how these complex structural changes evolve over time. Thus, determining the impacts of structural DNA changes is critical to understanding how species may be adapting to novel and varied environments. During this project, the fellow will also build connections between Biology and Art undergraduate students to generate meaningful science communication pieces for public display. Much of the work on diversification, speciation, and adaptive potential in birds has focused on the use of specific loci, mainly single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and how they correlate with the environment or phenotype. Structural variants (SVs) in