My laboratory group is interested in understanding the biotic and abiotic factors that drive speciation. On a fine scale, we study this process in contact zones between taxa, where interactions between species are indirectly causing behavioral and genomic divergence within species. On a broad scale, we study speciation across deep and shallow clades using cutting-edge phylogenomic techniques that we developed and utilize at FSU’s Center for Anchored Phylogenomics (www.anchoredphylogeny.com), which I co-direct with Dr. Alan Lemmon (Department of Scientific Computing).

Postdoctoral researchers would have the opportunity to become involved in a wide variety of ongoing empirical and computational projects, ranging from elucidating patterns of acoustic signal and female preference evolution during reinforcement, to mapping the genetic architecture of reproductive traits, to testing hypotheses of biogeographic expansion and trait divergence across diverse clades, to assessing the assumptions of phylogenetic methods through simulation studies.

Our laboratory is very integrative, and lab members can participate in projects being conducted by our hundreds of collaborators worldwide through the Center for Anchored Phylogenomics. The Center provides students and postdocs with in-lab access to state-of-the-art molecular equipment and highly-trained lab technicians to assist with learning new molecular techniques. Furthermore, the Center’s bioinformatics lab offers advanced training in analysis of genome-scale data and provides access to high-powered computational resources (six linux workstations with 256 GB RAM and two 8 Core Intel Processsors and four TB SSD storage).

Our laboratory fosters diversity through extensive international collaboration with researchers on six continents, providing conceptual and technical training to frequent visitors from around the world. Members of the lab also participate in a variety of diversity-enhancing educational outreach activities in the local community.