center. In 2020 she replaced the ornithologist Frank Gill as an editor of the IOC World Bird List, an online list maintained on behalf of the International Ornithologists' Union. Rasmussen is married to Michael D. Gottfried, who is Curator of Paleontology, Associate Professor of Geology, and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science at MSU. Research highlights South American seabirds Rasmussen's early work was largely focused on studies of the systematics, ecology and behaviour of Patagonian seabirds, notably cormorants. She studied plumage variations in juvenile blue-eyed, king and red-legged cormorants, and used plumage and behavioural patterns to establish relationships between king and blue-eyed shags. She also reviewed the fishing activity of olivaceous cormorants. Asian birds Rasmussen described four new Asian bird species from her study of museum specimens. The Nicobar scops owl Otus alius, the Sangihe scops owl Otus collari, and the cinnabar hawk owl Ninox ios, a Sulawesi endemic, all in 1998, and the Taiwan bush-warbler Bradypterus alishanensis in 2000. She rediscovered the forest owlet Athene blewitti, which had not been seen since 1884, in western India, previous searches by S. Dillon Ripley, Salim Ali and others having failed because they relied on fake documentation from Richard Meinertzhagen. In November 1997, Rasmussen and Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History spent ten days unsuccessfully searching two east Indian locations before driving west to the site of another old specimen, where King spotted a small, chunky owl with short, heavily white-feathered legs and huge claws, which Rasmussen confirmed as the target species whilst the owl was videotaped and photographed. With her colleagues, she clarified the taxonomy of Indonesian white-eyes, establishing the specific status of the Sangihe white-eye Zosterops nehrkorni and the Seram white-eye Z. stalkeri and confirmed the identity of the Serendib scops owl which had originally been discovered in Sri Lanka by local ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda. The imperial pheasant is a rare bird found in the forests of Vietnam and Laos. Rasmussen and her co-workers used morphology, hybridisation experiments, and DNA analysis to show that this pheasant, previously thought critically endangered, is actually a naturally occurring hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant Lophura hatinhensis and the subspecies annamensis of the silver pheasant L. nycthemera. A 2008 paper saw a return to white-eye taxonomy with the formal description of the Togian white-eye Zosterops somadikartai, an endemic species of the Togian Islands of Indonesia, which, unlike most