biology

Patty Brennan

Patty Brennan is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Patty Brennan rather than just read about it. In short: Patricia "Patty" Brennan is a Colombian and American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She is a professor of biology at Mount Holyoke College, and her research focuses on sexual selection, sexual conflict, and genital coevolution in vertebrates.

Key takeaways

Patty Brennan belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Patty Brennan to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Patty Brennan from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Patricia "Patty" Brennan is a Colombian and American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She is a professor of biology at Mount Holyoke College, and her research focuses on sexual selection, sexual conflict, and genital coevolution in vertebrates. Brennan's work on the genital morphology of waterfowl, particularly her research on duck penises and her discovery of variations in duck vaginas, has received extensive press coverage in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Scientific American. Her work on snake and dolphin clitorises has been featured in publications such as The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, New Scientist, and The Washington Post. She is an advocate for basic science, as well as for further research into vertebrate vaginas.

Early life and education Brennan was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She completed her Bachelor of Science in marine biology at the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1994. In 2005, she received her Doctor of Philosophy in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University, where she studied the reproductive biology of the great tinamou at the La Selva Biological Station. While conducting field research, she observed a corkscrew-shaped tinamou penis and wrote a post-doctoral project on bird genitalia after identifying a lack of research on the subject.

Career From 2005 to 2008, Brennan held a joint postdoctoral appointment at the University of Sheffield and Yale University, where she continued her research on the great tinamou and begin studying duck genitalia with Richard Prum and Tim Birkhead. After she received funding from the National Science Foundation to study duck penises, she was attacked by right-wing media for what was characterized as "wasteful" government spending. In response, she defended her work and the broader importance of basic research in the online magazine Slate and in the journal BioScience, and she began campaigning to support other scientists who dealt with similar attacks. She worked at Yale until 2009, after which she joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a research professor. Brennan joined the biological sciences faculty at Mount Holyoke College in 2015. In 2021, she received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study reproductive structures in snakes. In 2022, Brennan was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her contributions to biological sciences.

External media In 2007, Brennan was featured in a New York Times article about her discoveries concerning the co-evolution of duck genitalia. In 2012, Brennan made an appearance in a PBS miniseries on sexual selection in the episode "What Males Will Do". In 2017, Brennan was featured in the XX Files video series by Science.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Patty Brennan

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Patty Brennan claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Patty Brennan before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Patty Brennan ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Patty Brennan

In research: Patty Brennan appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Patty Brennan in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Patty Brennan is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century American biologists, 21st-century American women scientists, 21st-century Colombian biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Patty Brennan outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Patty Brennan in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Patty Brennan means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Patty Brennan out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Patty Brennan in simple terms?

Why does Patty Brennan matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Patty Brennan?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Patty Brennan.