PhD candidate
University of Georgia
About me
I am a PhD candidate in the Plant Biology department at the University of Georgia. I am broadly interested in studying the evolutionary relationships of plants using phylogenomics. Reticulate evolution is increasingly understood to be widespread in plants, and much of my dissertation has focused on developing tools to detect signals of introgression in phylogenomic datasets.
I am currently working on my dissertation, where I am characterizing the evolutionary consequences of hybridization and introgression in the carnivorous plant genus Sarracenia.
Plastome phylogenies that disagree with species phylogenies are often used as evidence for chloroplast capture, but rarely is this hypothesis formally tested against the null hypothesis of incomplete lineage sorting, which can also result in plastid tree discordance. In this study I use coalescent simulations to test this hypothesis, revealing widespread plastome capture throughout the genus.
I am assembling and annotating a chromosomal level reference genome for Sarracenia purpurea and Sarracenia psittacina. I sequenced an F1 hybrid between the two species and phased the haplotypes using a technique called trio-binning to produce two genomes for the price of one.
I am mapping the genetic architecture of traits that differentiate the pitchers of S. purpurea and S. psittacina.
I'm always interested in developing new tools to analyze data in new ways. Here are a few of my projects!
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