Hello, 

I am a population geneticist. Broadly, that means I'm interested in understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain biological diversity. I'm a postdoc in the Hahn lab at Indiana University. I used to be a grad student in the Kirkpatrick lab at the University of Texas at Austin. 

​I've done theoretical work (coalescent and classic pop-gen models), mostly focused on chromosomal rearrangements (inversions, fusions, etc.) and sex chromosomes. I've used different computational and statistical methods to quantify a variety of evolutionary forces in natural populations, including selection against hybrids in wildflowers, assortative mating in mosquitoes, and recombination in frog sex chromosomes. More recently, I've also been interested in inferring regulatory evolution, epistatic interactions, and reproductive isolation (using transcriptomic and phenotypic data).

Google Scholar Profile

What I've been working on lately

• Examining how convergence and incomplete lineage sorting affect the study of trait evolution: I'm deriving expressions to quantify the probabilities of homoplasy and hemiplasy along all branches of a phylogenetic tree. I will be using these probabilities to develop a test for the relative likelihood of hemiplasy and homoplasy given an incongruent trait.​  
• Studying the evolution of chromosome rearrangements: I'm developing software for the population genetic analysis of chromosome inversions, which will allow us to test hypotheses on the evolution of these rearrangements and their role in local adaptation.
• Understanding the evolution of new sex chromosomes: I'm assembling the genomes of two species of nightshades that have evolved dioecy independently. I aim to infer the sequence of sex-linked regions, which will serve as groundwork for the study of this nascent sex chromosomes.

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