People in the lab
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Gabriel Costa
visiting scholar Gabriel is a sabbatical visiting scholar from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. His research program focuses on understanding how biodiversity changes in space. He seeks to uncover how and why the number of species, the evolutionary lineages they represent, and the ecological characteristics they hold vary across space. The results of this variation can produce remarkable patterns (e.g., species richness gradients). By understanding what factors influence how biodiversity changes across space, we can hope to quantify, predict, mitigate and possibly manage the growing impacts caused by human activities. Webpage: http://costagc.weebly.com/ google scholar page |
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Michael Grundler
PhD student Mike joined the Rabosky lab as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2014. His research addresses variation in feeding ecology among vertebrate predators with an emphasis on snakes. He is interested in why some clades vary so much in feeding ecology and others so little and whether such variation is related to variation in species richness and rates of lineage diversification. Time in the field is spent in southeastern Arizona and northern Michigan. |
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Michael Harvey
Post-doctoral scholar Michael Harvey studies population genomics, speciation, and phenotypic evolution in Neotropical forest birds. His research program involves field work throughout the Neotropics, use of museum collections, genetic methods, and comparative analyses. Mike is most interested in how the ecology of species impacts their genetic diversity and population history, and in associations between diversity within species and across species. Webpage: www.mharvey.org |
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Iris Holmes
PhD student Iris joined the lab in Fall 2014. She is interested in the ecology and evolution of squamate gut microbiota. |
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Joanna Larson
PhD student Joanna is interested in understanding the processes that have shaped the distribution of amphibian species richness across space and clades. She integrates phylogenetic, ecological, and phenotypic data to test hypotheses about the influence of community-level processes on broad scale patterns. |
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Jonathan Mitchell
Post-doctoral scholar Jonathan is interested in the evolution of ecological disparity within diverse clades, and especially the role biotic interactions play in mediating the rate of ecological evolution. His work focuses on uniting paleoecology with phylogenetic methods and he primarily uses data from birds and archosaurs. http://jonsmitchell.com/ google scholar page |
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Sonal Singhal
Post-doctoral scholar Sonal's dissertation research investigated patterns of hybridization and introgression across five overlapping contact zones in Australian rainforest lizards, and her previous postdoctoral research characterized patterns of fine-scale recombination rates in populations of two wild bird species. Her current work investigates the connection between population genetic variation and macroevolutionary patterns in Australian desert lizards and the determinants and consequences of geographic range evolution. |
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Rudolf von May
Post-doctoral scholar Rudolf's current research seeks to understand how amphibian and reptile communities are structured across habitats and elevations in the Andes-Amazon region (South America). At the Rabosky Lab, he is examining the links between species’ ecological traits and phylogenetic relatedness to infer patterns of community assembly and niche evolution across local and regional scales. https://sites.google.com/site/rvonmay/ google scholar page |
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Talia Moore
Visiting scholar Talia studies the evolution, biomechanics, and field ecology of bipedalism in desert rodents in Asia, Australia and California. She is visiting the Rabosky lab from Harvard University for the academic year 2015-2016, and will defend her PhD in May 2016. https://sites.google.com/site/taliayukimoore/ google scholar page |
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Jeff Shi
PhD student Jeff's dissertation research focuses on macroevolutionary patterns and processes in bats (Order Chiroptera). Bats are one of the most diverse groups of modern mammals, and are not only rich in species diversity, but in multiple axes of morphological and ecological diversity. By integrating data from the field and collections, and using the power of modern computational methods, Jeff seeks to understand what has driven the remarkable radiation of these charismatic animals. jeffjshi.weebly.com |
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Pascal Title
PhD student Pascal's research focuses on the macroevolution of Australian lizards and snakes. In particular, he is interested in the spatial distribution of diversity, and how that may or may not reflect evolutionary history and landscape effects on diversification. He is also interested in phylogenetics and phenotypic evolution. pascaltitle.weebly.com |
Research Assistants
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Maggie Grundler
post-graduate researcher trophic divergence of Australian squamate reptiles using stable isotope analysis |
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Erich Eberhard
undergraduate researcher Evolution of hylid frog morphology |
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Allie Snell
undergraduate researcher Evolution of murid rodent morphology |
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Abe Weiner
high school researcher Evolution of bufonid frog morphology |
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Monica West
undergraduate researcher Evolution of ranid frog morphology |
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Heather Williams
undergraduate researcher Morphometrics of bats and Neotropical snakes |
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Erin Westeen
undergraduate researcher Quantification of shape across modern bat skulls and in snake teeth |
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Past Lab Members
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Carlos Anderson
Postdoctoral Scholar |
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Huateng Huang
Postdoctoral Scholar Huateng is interested in studying the relationship between population genetic processes and the macroevolution patterns of speciation and extinction. With next-generation sequencing, we can estimate population genetic parameters (e.g., genetic diversity and population structure) for many non-model organisms, which can be used in the framework of comparative phylogenetics to test macroevolutionary hypotheses about how speciation and extinction rates might be affected by these microevolutionary processes. |
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Bryan Juarez
Masters student For Bryan's Master's thesis he is identifying the relationship between the evolutionary tempo/mode and ecomorphometric diversity in early tetrapods (coelacanths and lungfish). This study primarily focuses on the end-Devonian Hangenberg mass extinction which effectively resulted in the diversification of the earliest terrestrial tetrapods due to the significant shift in the dominant ichthyofauna that followed the extinction. Early aquatic tetrapod fish diversity has been greatly underappreciated and largely ignored; Bryan has found that there exist >700 morphologically distinct species. |