2026 AOS Early Professional Awards to Devon DeRaad, Fengyi Guo, and Olivia M. Smith

The American Ornithological Society (AOS) annually bestows research awards honoring early-career researchers for their ornithological research. The AOS’s James G. Cooper Early Professional Award and the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award are presented annually to recognize outstanding and promising work by researchers early in their careers. Our 2026 James G. Cooper Award winners are Devon DeRaad and Fengyi Guo. For 2026, the AOS awarded the Ned K. Johnson Award to Olivia M. Smith. Dr. Devon DeRaad is a La Kretz Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Kansas in 2024 and his B.A. in Biology from Occidental College in 2017. Dr. DeRaad is an evolutionary genomicist whose research seeks to understand how speciation and extinction generate and maintain global biodiversity. His work integrates genomic, phenotypic, behavioral, and ecological data from bird populations worldwide, with a particular focus on island systems that provide natural laboratories for studying the full “life cycle” of species—from early divergence to hybridization and extinction risk. His research has helped resolve longstanding questions about rapid diversification, hybrid zone dynamics, and phylogenomic discordance in birds, including influential studies of kingfishers, scrub-jays, grosbeaks, and white-eyes. Dr. DeRaad has co-authored 30 peer-reviewed publications (12 as lead author), including papers in Science, Evolution, and Systematic Biology, and has secured more than $600,000 in competitive funding, including an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology.