Dr. Francie Cuthbert in her element.

The University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) is honored to host Dr. Francie Cuthbert as our Hann Endowed Lecturer in Ornithology as part of the 2021 Summer Lecture Series.

Cuthbert, a professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at University of Minnesota, is the world's foremost expert on the Great Lakes population of endangered Piping Plovers. She has been studying plovers and implementing a robust plan for their conservation and recovery since the mid-1980s.

She also boasts a long history at UMBS not only as a researcher, but as a teaching assistant and instructor for the Biology of Birds undergraduate course. As Dr. Jordan Price points out in his introduction of Cuthbert, she has also earned the exclusive designation as a "camp kid", having spent early summers at UMBS where her parents worked as biologists.

Listen in as Cuthbert recounts her decades-long effort to bring the Great Lakes population of Piping Plovers back from the brink of extinction. Please join us next Wednesday, July 21st for Dr. Jessica Hellmann's Pettingill Endowed Lecture in Natural History: Population biology in study, in practice, and in the human imagination.