About Dr. Don Powers
Don Powers is a physiological ecologist studying how animals — mostly birds — manage energy, water, and heat. His recent work focuses on how hummingbirds regulate body temperature during hovering, the most energetically demanding form of locomotion in the animal world. Their flight muscles are mechanically inefficient, generating excess heat that must be dissipated — a challenge with new relevance as climate change may threaten hummingbirds' role as pollinators. Now Professor Emeritus, he remains an active researcher, with projects in Montana, Arizona, and Canada.
Academic history
Don grew up in La Jolla, California, and earned his B.S. in Biology at Biola College (1979). He went on to San Diego State University for an M.S. (1982), working with George Cox on how food quality shapes breeding territoriality in Anna’s hummingbirds — the start of a lifelong fascination with hummingbird energetics. He completed his Ph.D. in Physiological Ecology at UC Davis (1989) under Wesley Weathers, studying the energy and water relations of hummingbirds.
George Fox University
Don joined George Fox University (then George Fox College) in 1989 as Assistant Professor and spent 34 years on the faculty — until his retirement as a full Professor in 2023. He chaired the Department of Biology and Chemistry for over a decade (1998–2009) and later served on the Faculty Senate (2017–2023). Along the way he built a research program that ran almost entirely on undergraduate student researchers, many of whom appear as co-authors on his published work. Several of these students have gone on to graduate programs and research careers of their own.
A career highlight: his 2005 Nature paper on the aerodynamics of hovering hummingbirds, with Bret Tobalske and Douglas Warrick — still a foundational paper on hummingbird flight biomechanics.
Current research
Body-heat management in flying birds
A long-running collaboration with Bret Tobalske’s lab at the University of Montana, using infrared thermography to understand how birds dissipate the heat generated by flight muscles during hovering and forward flight. Originally focused on hummingbirds, the work has since extended into comparative studies in other species, including a recent project on plumage and heat dissipation in doves.
Hummingbird foraging ecology
Collaborating with researchers at the University of Washington and the Burke Museum, the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad, and the University of Montana on how hummingbirds cope with dilute nectar resources — recent work (Elting et al. 2026, Functional Ecology) identified a physiological ceiling on compensatory feeding that constrains which nectar concentrations hummingbirds can subsist on, with implications for pollination under climate change.
Avian torpor
A long-running collaboration (the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad, the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, and the Hummingbird Monitoring Network) examining how hummingbirds balance energy savings against the costs of deep versus shallow torpor, both under controlled conditions and in the wild. New genomic work is extending this line into the molecular regulation of torpor.
Keel bone fractures in laying hens
A collaboration with the University of Guelph, studying the physiological consequences of keel bone fractures in commercial laying hens.
CV
Full academic CV, including publications, grants, and teaching history.
Download full CV (PDF)Contact
To get in touch with Don, email dpowers@georgefox.edu.