Olivia Smith wins early investigator award from the American Ornithological Society
How can we make farms work better for people and the planet?
That’s the question behind much of the work in Olivia Smith’s lab. The EEB core faculty member and assistant professor of horticulture is particularly interested in how farms and bird diversity can work together. For her work, she has been selected as the 2026 recipient of the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award by the American Ornithological Society (AOS).
Olivia M. Smith, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Michigan State University
The award recognizes “outstanding and promising work by a researcher early in their career in any field of ornithology.”
In her research, Smith uses field surveys, experiments, GIS, social surveys, and meta-analysis to understand how to best conserve birds in agricultural landscapes.
In one project, she and MSU professor Catherine Lindell are working with cherry growers who are turning to predatory falcons to keep hungry songbirds like robins and grackles — and their droppings — off farmers' fruit. In another project, she is studying how nesting birds impact insect pests and food safety on Michigan’s urban and rural farms.
Smith has published 40 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, including first-authored manuscripts in PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Journal of Applied Ecology, and more. She has co-authored articles in leading journals such as Science, Global Change Biology, and One Earth. She also served as an associate editor for the AOS journal Ornithological Applications from 2021–2024. Her research has previously been recognized through honors such as the Frontiers Planet Prize, and she received AOS Travel Grants in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
Prior to joining the faculty at MSU in 2024, Smith was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia, an EEB Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at MSU, and also held a postdoctoral fellowship from the USDA. She earned a B.S. from Siena Heights University in 2013, a Master’s from The Ohio State University in 2015, and a Ph.D. in biology from Washington State University in 2019.
Smith will accept her award and deliver a plenary address titled “Farming with the flock: Redesigning agricultural systems for people and nature” at the AOS 2026 meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts.
