About Me
My main interests involve: understanding variation in genome structure and the genetic basis of key traits, adaptation, and speciation - which I have predominantly investigated using genomic methods.
I have investigated these questions in: Howea palm trees 🌴 (and their associated soil microbial communities), sharks 🦈, Alpine whitefish 🐟, Danaus butterflies 🦋, Poecilia fish species 🐟, and most recently Pacific rockfish 🐟 and primates 🐒.
I've been lucky enough to carry out this work at: the National Botanic Garden of Wales, Imperial College London, Kew Gardens, Eawag (the Swiss federal department for aquatic research), the University of Edinburgh, the University of California Santa Cruz, and I am currently based at the University of California, Berkeley.
Primates
In my current role I am working on a National Institute on Aging project focused around better understanding somatic evolution in primates, with a focus on the role of somatic structural variants in the evolution of aging and lifespan. Additionally, I am working on understanding the genetic basis of longevity in rockfish - a particularly diverse clade of marine fishes that have extraordinary lifespans, up to 200 years.
Poeciliid Fishes
In my previous postdoc position I studied patterns of convergence across species of Poeciliid fishes where tolerance to hydrogen-sulfide-rich streams has evolved multiple times. This work involved identifying patterns of convergent evolution in coding and regulatory regions across species, integrating data from across biological scales of organization, as well as generating and analyzing a whole-genome resequencing dataset of 160 Poecilia mexicana individuals from Mexico.
Danaus Butterflies
In my first postdoc I was funded by an Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to study the evolution and maintenance of a wing-pattern supergene in the African Monarch butterfly Danaus chrysippus. This work spans a number of topics including the assembly and annotation of multiple Danaus chrysippus reference genome assemblies, and the analysis of these assemblies and annotations to understand the structure of different supergene alleles (each associated with different wing-patterns) and how they evolved.
Alpine Whitefish
Prior to my postdocs I completed my PhD at Eawag & the University of Bern in Switzerland under the supervision of Philine Feulner and Ole Seehausen and my research interests were mainly related to the genomic patterns underpinning adaptation and speciation. My PhD project was focused on understanding genomic divergence, the genetic basis of core ecological traits, and the genetic basis of speciation (reproductive isolation) between members of the diverse Alpine whitefish radiation (Coregonus lavaretus species complex).
Howea Palms
Before my PhD I undertook an MRes in Tropical Forest Ecology at Imperial College London. My dissertation project was based in the Savolainen lab where I applied what I had learned during a summer internship at Kew Gardens and investigated the soil and root microbiome (including bacterial and fungal communities) associated with the Howea palms of Lord Howe Island. Specifically I investigated the potential for the root-associated microbiome to facilitate sympatric speciation.