Albert is a co-author of

Toward a Comprehensive Anatomical Matrix for Crown Birds: Phylogenetic Insights from the Pectoral Girdle and Forelimb Skeleton 

A Chen ,  E M Steell ,  R B J Benson ,  D J Field

Integrative Organismal Biology, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2025, obaf029, https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaf029

At IOB we like to spotlight not only the papers we publish but also the scientists behind those papers.

Below, Albert Chen answered several questions about their scientific journey and their thoughts on the obstacles facing the science community today. 

Tell us a bit about your early interest in the sciences. 

Looking back, do you have a first experience or “aha” moment in school where you knew you wanted to pursue being a scientist? 

In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that I would end up pursuing science, because I’ve been intensely interested in animals and learning everything I could about them for as far back as I can remember. However, it was probably in high school when I decided concretely that science was something I wanted to do. That was when I started reading scientific papers and corresponding with professional scientists, gaining a more detailed understanding of the scientific process and how scientific knowledge was obtained.

What do you feel are some of the surprising things you’ve learned along the way? 

The more we know, the more we realize how little we know! Something that fascinates me about birds (the main group of animals that I research) is how much we have yet to learn about them despite how extensively they’ve been studied. Birds are among the easiest animals for us to observe in the wild on a day-to-day basis, and lots of people have been interested in birds for a very long time. It has been estimated that in 2022, there were approximately 96 million birdwatchers in the United States alone. Despite all this attention, there are some seemingly basic questions about bird biology that we don’t yet have answers for. I study the evolutionary relationships among different groups of birds, and (even though there have been major advances in genetic sequencing and analysis) we still aren’t entirely sure whether a hummingbird is more closely related to a penguin than to a gull.

Things get even more complicated when we look at fossil birds, most of which are too old to preserve any genetic material. In our new paper published in Integrative Organismal Biology, we examined over 200 distinct characteristics in the bones of the bird wing and shoulder girdle. Some of these bones are among the most robust elements in the skeleton of flight-capable birds, and so are more likely to be found in the fossil record. We were interested in finding out whether there were specific features in the bones that might help us identify how long-extinct birds were related to modern ones. We did find some such features, but at the same time, we showed that the bird wing and shoulder skeleton is exceptionally prone to convergent evolution: distantly related bird species can have very similar-looking wing bones, probably as adaptations to similarities in flight style, habitat, and body size. We concluded that the wing and shoulder bones of birds do have value in understanding their evolutionary relationships, but also that we need to be very cautious in determining the affinities of very incomplete fossil specimens known only from these bones.

What are some of your goals (research and otherwise) for the future? 

Honestly, I think I’d be happy as long as I were in a position where I could continue investigating current mysteries in bird evolution, fossils, and anatomy. I also wouldn’t mind applying the techniques I’ve used on birds to other groups of animals. In fact, it would be something of a throwback: I did my Masters’ degree on the evolution of crustaceans!

I also enjoy sharing information about my area of research outside of strictly academic settings. It’s long been a dream of mine to build a website that provides an accessible current overview of bird paleontology and evolution, because so much of the knowledge in this field is presently only available in technical papers. I think writing a book on these subjects would be fun, too! However, projects like those would be immense undertakings… which is a major reason why I haven’t done them yet.

They say we learn best from our perceived failures. Can you detail for us a bit about project or experiment that at the time you felt failed, yet when you think of it now, you learned from? (and what did you learn?) 

Although I wouldn’t call them failures necessarily, we ran into some challenges working on this paper due to the large number of bird species and features that we had to collect data on. The entire process took so long that more than once we had to redo our analyses and rewrite sections of the paper to account for new scientific discoveries that had been made in the meantime, such as the new family tree of birds presented in Nature by Stiller et al. (2024).

Even though this required a fair amount of additional work on this project, I’m happy that we made those changes. For one, they were necessary to ensure that our study stayed rigorous and was informed by the latest scientific developments at the time that we submitted it. For another, we made some interesting findings in doing so. It turned out that among the alternative genetic family trees that have been proposed for birds in recent years, the Stiller et al. (2024) tree was one of those that aligned best with the anatomical dataset we had assembled. So in investigating this topic, we found some independent support for a novel family tree that hadn’t even been published when we’d first collected our data (and despite the large amount of convergent evolution in the skeletal traits).

What do you feel are some of the obstacles facing the science community today, and what ideas do you have about how to face them? 

My goodness, it would probably be quicker to list what obstacles the science community isn’t facing nowadays! We live at a time when some of the most influential governments in the world are severely undervaluing and even actively obstructing scientific progress. I certainly think that those of us in positions to keep doing science should continue to do so. In addition, science education is more crucial than ever, not only in terms of disseminating knowledge on scientific findings, but also on the workings of science and scientists as people. There is an important role here for artists and storytellers who know how to present this information in accessible, engaging, and memorable ways. For everyone who values science and has the right to participate in democracies, one of the most critical things we can do is to vote and advocate for governmental policies that promote scientific research and development. And as difficult as it might be in this current climate, we should all try our best to care for and enjoy ourselves—we will not be able to do any of the above properly if we’re completely burned out.

Who were some of your mentors over the years and what are some of the things they imparted to you? 

I can certainly attest to the unparalleled value of strong mentorship in science. Two key figures from early in my academic journey were my undergraduate instructors Drs. Thomas Holtz and John Merck at the University of Maryland, College Park. I learned a lot about science from their courses on paleontology, geology, and climate change, but more than that, they were also class acts in how to teach science effectively. Furthermore, they have been nothing but supportive of me throughout this time, from directing me to appropriate opportunities to writing countless letters of recommendation (sometimes to this day!). I absolutely would not have made it to where I am today without them.

Prof. Daniel Field at the University of Cambridge (formerly University of Bath), who supervised my PhD and co-authored this paper, has also been amazing. He has a real knack for proposing ideas for research projects that are both cutting-edge and interesting, and has gone well above and beyond in supporting my studies and career as well. His style of lab management promotes kindness and collaboration, driving home the message that being a good scientist is not only about trying to do good science (which is of course important!), but striving to be a good person, too.

If you had to offer any advice to scientists starting out now, what would it be? 

There’s probably a lot about being a scientist in these strange and unpredictable times that I still haven’t figured out! However, a few things come to mind that I think would be helpful for scientists living in any age. One is learning to live with uncertainty. It can be tempting to take the most recent or most personally appealing ideas as definitive, but the truth is that in science we often encounter situations where the available evidence is inconclusive or contradictory. In these cases, we should try to remain open to alternative possibilities and be honest about the level of confidence we have in specific hypotheses. Scientific consensus typically forms from the accumulation of many studies and discoveries over time, rarely from the weight of a single paper.

Another is to learn widely outside of one’s immediate field of interest. Although nobody can become an expert in absolutely everything, reading broadly will not only give you a more complete understanding of the world, but can also offer new insights on how to approach problems in your field. Our paper is on birds, yet we also ended up citing studies on crocodiles, mammals, insects, and even plants, because scientists researching those organisms have often had to struggle with similar questions to ours. Drawing connections among these studies can improve your scientific rigor, and may make your research more interesting to a wider audience as well.

Last but not least: have fun! Our universe is an amazing place, and discovering new things about it is one of the most rewarding experiences that I can imagine.

Connect with Albert via Linktree

Albert Chen is a Research Fellow in Science at Jesus College, Cambridge. Their research focuses on birds and bird-like dinosaurs, integrating genetic data from living species with anatomical data from both living and fossil species to infer how these animals lived and evolved over time.