Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, was awarded a one-year $149,729 National Science Foundation EAGER grant for the project “Removing barriers to macro-ecoevolutionary studies of the avian brain.” The new award will allow Botero to build out a dataset that integrates studies on brain size variation with a variety of high-quality time series data on the ecology, demography and phenology of birds. The project also will examine how different historical and natural history constraints can lead to fundamentally different pathways for brain size evolution.