The Nowicki laboratory studies the ecology and evolution of animal behavior, especially questions about the evolution of diversity and complexity in animal communication signals. Steve Nowicki's current work focuses on birdsong, although he and his students have worked on a diverse array of organisms including invertebrates such as insects, spiders, crabs, shrimp and lobsters, and other vertebrates including lizards, ground squirrels and primates. Research projects in the Nowicki lab tend to be interdisciplinary, combining natural history and field experimentation, with laboratory studies of perception, neuroanatomy, functional morphology, phylogenetic analysis, and state-of-the-art digital signal processing. Steve Nowicki's own ongoing research projects lie in two main areas. The first concerns the evolution of receiver preferences for signal characteristics, with the goal of determining the proximate mechanisms by which signals may provide accurate information about the sender's condition or other relevant characteristics. The second main area examines how morphological and physiological mechanisms of signal production influence the evolution of signal diversity. Most of this research is done in collaboration with Susan Peters. Another important long-time collaborator is Bill Searcy, Maytag Professor of Biology at the University of Miami. Graduate students and post-docs in the Nowicki lab frequently collaborate on these projects, but students general develop their own independent research questions concerning animal communication, its ecology, and evolution.