A childhood trip to Cannon Beach launched this Harvard student’s quest to help decipher evolution

As a child growing up in Beaverton, Ashwin Sivakumar thought of puffins much the way he did penguins and polar bears – as special creatures from the globe’s far reaches that he would never get to see in the wild.

And then, on a family outing to Cannon Beach when he was in second or third grade, a local volunteer let him spy through a bird spotting scope at the familiar-to-Oregonians outlines of Haystack Rock. And there, recognizable in their orange-billed, plumed-headed glory, were puffins galore, resting on the magnificent outcropping.

Young Ashwin was astonished and delighted: “The idea that they were nesting just an hour and a half from where I lived was mind-boggling,” he recalls. Immediately he wondered: What other kinds of marvelous birds might he see near home?

Soon he was urging his father to take him to Sauvie Island and other noted birding spots around Portland. By sixth grade, he had observed 206 species of birds in the continental U.S.

Flash forward 10 years and Sivakumar had become an integrative biology major at Harvard paid to conduct groundbreaking research into how the genes of closely related bird species help cause the variation in the architecture of their wings. (He had also built his birding list past 500 and helped countless others launch their own birding journeys.)

Now, as he works to wrap up that research in March, he’s preparing to attack even bigger questions about evolutionary change, species adaptation and the processes by which biodiversity emerges.

And, having been named a Marshall Scholar, he has a sure path to do so. The ultra prestigious award, given to just 43 U.S. college students for 2026, will pay all his expenses for three years of pursuing his Ph.D. in England.

But, in a surprising turn after his dozen-plus years of being all about birds, he’s going to switch to fish – specifically a family of fish known as cichlids. He’ll be working with one of the world’s foremost evolutionary geneticists, Richard Durbin of the University of Cambridge.

You’ve probably seen cichlids. They are brightly colored and remarkably easy to raise in captivity, making them common inhabitants of showpiece aquariums in dentist’s offices and the like.

But what drew Durbin, and now Sivakumar, to them is their extraordinarily speedy genetic differentiation. In less than a million years, cichlids have gone from a single ancestor species to more than 1,000 distinct species, at least 800 of which can be found in a single deepwater lake in Africa, Sivakumar says. And, he notes, those many, many species emerged without any physical barriers that separate them from each other.

What, he asks, is the genetic basis that separated the fish into separate species that can no longer freely breed across those lines?

Researchers are very skilled, he says, at determining what causes the genetic variation within a single species, such as what in the human genome explains height differences in people. But, Sivakumar says, “our methods are very underdeveloped for pinning down what is the genetic basis for differences between species.”

“Part of the work I am going to be doing in Cambridge, in addition to applying existing methods, is to develop new methods to explain trait differences between species.”

Andrew Berry, an evolutionary geneticist who’s taught Sivakumar at Harvard, said he’s convinced the young man “is destined to have a major scientific impact.”

“Academically brilliant, Ashwin has already done extraordinary research,” Berry said. “There is often a disconnect between raw academic ability … and research skills. Some students are superb on paper but leave a trail of broken glassware in the lab — they have difficulty making the transition from book learning to the practical business of ‘doing’ science. That transition, for Ashwin, is seamless.”

In addition, Berry said, “he’s a scientist who can unpack what he’s doing and explain it engagingly to a general audience. This is where the ‘influence global public policy’ piece enters the picture. Ashwin is a scientist for sure, but he also recognizes that science can only be effective in the public domain if it’s effectively communicated.”

Sivakumar said that, because genomic sequencing has already been completed on about 200 species of cichlids, the fish will be a great place to launch his new research into genetic differentiation.

During his four years at Cambridge, he hopes to take a species collecting trip to Lake Malawi, where the hundreds of cichlid species coexist, and expects to present juried research findings at conferences around the globe.

Berry said Sivakumar’s quest could help the world better cope with climate change and extinction.

“We need to understand the processes of species origination and extinction — the birth and death of species over time — if we are to grapple effectively with the biodiversity crises confronting our planet,” Berry said. “Biologists need to understand the evolutionary dynamics of natural systems before we can stage effective conservation and management interventions. Ashwin’s twin skills — science and exposition — promise extraordinary contributions.”

In addition to seeking breakthroughs in evolutionary genetics, Sivakumar hopes to gain direct insight into the ways intellectual and scientific cultures in the U.K. differ from those in the U.S.

He also hopes to more closely follow, and perhaps directly observe, some of the so-called rewilding efforts underway in Great Britain, especially in Scotland, to rekindle native habitats and reintroduce native species long disappeared from the British Isles.

“My interest in science very much came from my passion for the natural world and wildlife and birding,” he said. “I maintain that interest in the natural world. It captures our wonder every day.”