Dr. David Westneat has been awarded a four year grant from the National Science Foundation for $305,000. The grant, which begins August 2013, will fund his project "Parental care and the integration of personality and plasticity at multiple levels of phenotypic variance". The project will examine the constituent components of variance in parental behavior of house sparrows to determine why birds that diligently care for offspring are more flexible.  The project is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Matthew Schofield in the Statistics Department. More information about Dr. Westneat's research can be found on his lab website.