2025 AOS Peter R. Stettenheim Service Awards to Sharon Gill and Brian Peer

The AOS offers two awards, the Peter R. Stettenheim Service Award and the Marion Jenkinson Service Award, to recognize AOS members who have provided continued, exceptional service to ornithology and to the society. This year, the AOS bestows Peter R. Stettenheim Service Award on Sharon Gill and Brian Peer. Dr. Sharon Gill is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Western Michigan University. She first began to love birds while working as a field assistant during her BSc at the University of Manitoba. She completed her MSc there before attending York University for her PhD, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Gill explores sound across multiple scales, from individuals to the overall sound environment, working on both basic research and more applied questions. Her research group examines the evolution of functional reference in alarm calls and compositionality in call repertoires, as well as birdsong and the partitioning of acoustic space within bird communities. They also study human effects on natural sounds by considering the impacts of anthropogenic noise on singing behavior and soundscapes across nature preserves. Gill is a past winner of two AOS Student Research Grants (1993, 1998) and was elected as an AOS Elective Member in 2014 and an AOS Fellow in 2017. Gill is also an interdisciplinary artist whose practice brings together ecology, fiber art, video, and performance in explorations of bird extinctions, environmental grief, and personal loss.