2025 AOS Early Professional Awards to Teresa Pegan, Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, and Maria Stager

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 2025 James G. Cooper Award winners are Teresa Pegan and Valentina Gómez-Bahamón. For 2025, the AOS awarded the Ned K. Johnson Award to Maria Stager. Teresa Pegan, PhD received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 2015 and her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2023, advised by Benjamin Winger. She is now a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, co-sponsored by Scott Edwards at Harvard University and Nathan Senner at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Pegan is interested in how migratory life-history strategies influence avian evolution. Her current work focuses on population and evolutionary genomics of extreme long-distance migrants in Charadriiformes (shorebirds and relatives). Her past work has been recognized by the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Tinkle Award and an AOS Kessel Publication Award (Winger and Pegan 2021). Pegan was previously awarded the AOS Werner and Hildegard Hesse Research Grant (2019), an AOS Katma Award (2020; Winger et al. 2019), and AOS annual meeting travel grants (2024, 2023, 2016).