Moises Rivera, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Moises is a post-doctoral research associate in the Woolley lab. He earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York, during which time he studied and published his findings on the effects of acoustic stimulation on both immediate early gene expression and epigenetic regulation in the auditory forebrain of embryonic songbirds. Moises began working in the Woolley lab in 2016 during his PhD and has led analyses using various statistical and machine learning models in order to classify the songs of Estrildid finches and link them to phylogeny. Moises has also used a suite of behavioral tests to explore the effects of genetic and social conditions on the preferences, discrimination abilities, filial associations, and sexual selection of multiple estrildid species, including hybridized, cross-fostered, and "bi-specifically" reared finches. Moises supervises husbandry of the Woolley bird colonies, including the breeding of various African, Australian, and Asian estrildids.
Moises has served as an instructor of statistics and experimental psychology courses at Hunter College since 2018. Moises continues to co-mentor Columbia students with Sarah, leading to successful conference presentations and theses.
Moises is broadly interested in neuroethology, data science, and statistics, and hopes to eventually apply his skills and love for data collection and analysis in industry.
Moises is a lover of living things and spends much of his time out of lab caring for his own small assemblage of birds and plants at home as well as his zestful dog Astro(cyte).
Publications:
Rivera, M., Edwards, J. A., Hauber, M. E., & Woolley, S. M. N. (2023). Machine learning and statistical classification of birdsong link vocal acoustic features with phylogeny. Scientific Reports, 13:7076. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-33825-5
Yeh, Y.-T., Rivera, M., & Woolley, S. M. N. (2023). Auditory sensitivity and vocal acoustics in five species of estrildid songbirds. Animal Behaviour, 195:107-116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.11.002
*Antonson, N. D., *Rivera, M., Abolins-Abols, M., Kleindorfer, S., Liu, W.-c., & Hauber, M. E. (2021). Early auditory experience alters genome-wide methylation in the auditory forebrain of songbird embryos. Neuroscience Letters, 755,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2021.135917Covered in Medical Xpress.
*Shared first-authorship; these authors contributed equally to this work.
Rivera, M., Cealie, M., Hauber, M. E., Kleindorfer, S., & Liu, W.-c. (2019). Neural activation in response to conspecific songs in zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) embryos and nestlings. NeuroReport, 30:217-221,
https://doi.org/10.1097/WNR.0000000000001187 Covered in IFLScience!
Rivera, M., Louder, M. I. M., Kleindorfer, S., Liu, W.-c., & Hauber, M. E. (2018). Avian prenatal auditory stimulation: Progress and perspectives. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 72:112,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-018-2528-0