Kyle Elliott with the Great Auk in the Field Museum of Natural History. Photo credit: Courtesy of Kyle Elliott

The American Ornithologists' Union is honored to present the 2015 Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award to Dr. Kyle Elliott. Kyle received a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba in 2013, was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (2013–2015), and is now an assistant professor at McGill University.

Kyle has a truly outstanding record of research and leadership that would be very difficult to match by anyone at a similar stage of their career. To date, he has published 66 peer-reviewed papers (28 since 2013), including articles in top journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Animal Ecology, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology Letters, and Animal Behaviour. With nearly 900 citations and an “h-index” of 17, Kyle's scholarly achievements are remarkable for someone who defended his Ph.D. a little more than 2 years ago.

Kyle's doctoral research was focused on seabird physiology and senescence, studying two populations in which many birds were of known age as a result of being banded as nestlings: one in Alaska and one in northern Hudson Bay. He made extensive use of the latest techniques in bio-logging and blood chemistry analysis to assess changes in behavior and physiology with age, allowing him to determine that aging in his study species involved a gradual reduction of performance in certain physiological traits, but that birds adjusted their behavior to compensate for changes in their physical limits and maintained a uniform foraging performance over time. While a doctoral student, Kyle received NSERC's Ph.D. scholarship (Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship) as well as numerous other awards, including scholarships from the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Arctic Institute of North America.

We are confident that Kyle will further expand his already prodigious contributions to the scientific community, and we look forward to witnessing the new frontiers he will explore as a leader in ornithology. The American Ornithologists' Union is pleased to recognize Kyle with the Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award for 2015.