CURRENT RESEARCH
I am an evolutionary biologist pursuing a doctoral dissertation in computational evolutionary genomics. My research involves designing custom mathematical models consistent with alternative hypotheses and applying them to data sets. The application of these models will ultimately allow biologists to ask broader conceptual questions about evolution and the mechanisms involved. These complex models are designed to contain parameters that are informative about the underlying biological processes, can be differentiated using the techniques of model selection, and are better at answering more fundamental questions than standard statistical methods.
One current project explores the mechanisms that lead to pathway diversification between species. The mechanisms of interest are ones that lead to retention of duplicated genes. While dosage balance constraints are acting on duplicated genes after whole genome duplication events, mutation and selection may drive these duplicated genes to undergo subfuctionalization and neofunctionalization. The current project explores the myostatin pathway in salmonids and how specificity of the interactions between functional partners may have changed as the pathway duplicated twice. It also addresses if the pathway has diversified, and how diversification could potentially have occurred due to various processes as selection has acted on these whole genome duplication events.
​Duplicated genes are important because they are an important source of opportunities for evolution to occur. Another project gets at more specific models of the mechanisms and driving forces that cause these genes to be retained. Retention of genes following consecutive whole genome duplication events in Salmonids show an unexpected trend; gene duplication from one event seems to be independent of the retention state from the previous event. I am building nested models for various hypothesis that will help our understanding of the underlying process that leads to these results.
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In general, modeling in the biological sciences is a powerful tool. I am interested in how modeling can be applied to other areas of biology as well. For instance, modeling can aid in conservation and diversity ecology research. Building and applying such models with appropriate parameters can allow us to have a stronger understanding of how urbanization and geographic mosaics influence population fragmentation and species extinction. Some models could be borrowed from existing computational biology models by adjusting the parameters to make them more applicable to ecology and will be good representations of the underlying process.
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I am especially interested in using game theory models to understand the trade offs between different evolutionary strategies.
