My research focuses on understanding interactions among gene flow, population dynamics, environment, and species traits. I study these interactions mainly in aquatic vertebrates, and I use methods ranging from traditional mark-recapture techinques to landscape genomics and simulations to investigate these processes.
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Currently a postdoc in the Pinsky Lab!
News!
New publication in Molecular Ecology on historical demography and co-expansion in marine turtles, compiling data from all seven species!
Working with a small grant from Black Rock Forest Preserve to identify populations of rare turtles with environmental DNA. MSU undergrad Juhi Parekh was the lab linchpin who helped us figure out how to get our assays to work!
More work revisiting a long-term painted turtle study in MI. Summer REU student Marggie Glenn crunched a ton of mark recapture data to figure out how this population has changed over time - it's a sex ratio roller coaster!
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(Older) News
Painted turtles have the broadest current range of any freshwater turtle species in New World. A large portion of this range was covered in ice during the last glacial period. Where did they persist during this period, and how did they get from there to where they are now? Along with some great collaborators, I investigated the phylogeographic history of this species in a study recently published in the journal Heredity.
After a great summer as an REU intern in 2018, Al Nichols returned this summer to continue his work on links between demography, diet and morphology in turtles (focusing on the historic Sherriff's Marsh in Southwest Michigan). Get ready for some wicked stable isotope results soon!
I gave a presention on the effects of gene flow on fitness and local adaptation in small populations at the 2018 North American Congress for Conservation in Toronto, as part of a symposium on incorporating local adaptation into conservation organized by the Conservation Genetics Working Group. We had some great conversations and some exciting work is to come!
Attended 2018s Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists this summer in Rochester and gave a quick talk on hybrid RADseq/ sequence capture methods in darters. Kyle Janes and Dan Oliveira from the Fitz Lab also had terrific presentations!
News!
Spent much of July 2022 in the Philippines co-organizing the Philippines PIRE 'Omics workshop, which brought together students from the US and the Philippines to learn bioinformatic pipelines and demographic inference
We received a grant from the RCN for Evolution in Changing Seas to form a working group on Temporal Genomics - we'll be producing a review paper as well as a seminar series and a Twitter conference. See our website!
As of September 2021 I am working as a postdoc in Malin Pinsky's lab at Rutgers. I am working on the Philippines PIRE Project to infer changes in fish diversity over the past century using genomic data!
Still publishing work from my stint in Sarah Fitzpatrick's lab on guppies and Arkansas darters - check out my Google Scholar page if you're interested
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(Older) News
Painted turtles have the broadest current range of any freshwater turtle species in New World. A large portion of this range was covered in ice during the last glacial period. Where did they persist during this period, and how did they get from there to where they are now? Along with some great collaborators, I investigated the phylogeographic history of this species in a study recently published in the journal Heredity.
After a great summer as an REU intern in 2018, Al Nichols returned this summer to continue his work on links between demography, diet and morphology in turtles (focusing on the historic Sherriff's Marsh in Southwest Michigan). Get ready for some wicked stable isotope results soon!
I gave a presention on the effects of gene flow on fitness and local adaptation in small populations at the 2018 North American Congress for Conservation in Toronto, as part of a symposium on incorporating local adaptation into conservation organized by the Conservation Genetics Working Group. We had some great conversations and some exciting work is to come!
Attended 2018s Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists this summer in Rochester and gave a quick talk on hybrid RADseq/ sequence capture methods in darters. Kyle Janes and Dan Oliveira from the Fitz Lab also had terrific presentations!