Research
My interest in evolutionary biology stems from a fascination with the endless forms of the natural world and a desire to understand the origins of this diversity. My primary research interests include how ecological traits and geographical features influence diversification, the genomic architecture of local adaptation and reproductive isolation, introgression as source of adaptive genetic variation, and uncovering cryptic avian species. Birds interest me greatly, especially songbirds, as they are a diverse clade with a variety of mechanisms for species recognition and sexual selection, including song, plumage, and specific display behaviour, and tend to produce identifiable hybrids.
I am currently a PhD student in the Mason Lab at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. My dissertation research is on the comparative phylogeography and integrative taxonomy of birds associated with Polylepis forests in the central Andes.
Sex Linked Inversion in Zonotrichia Sparrows
My Honours research in the Irwin Lab focused on characterizing patterns of genomic differentiation between the Golden-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla) and the White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) using Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS). We uncovered extremely high relative differentiation, and increased absolute differentiation across a large region of the Z-chromosome, suggesting a region that has resisted introgression between these species. Furthermore, patterns of linkage disequilibrium in this region were consistent with a chromosomal inversion with inversion with inversion haplotypes that segregate between the two species.
A paper resulting from this work was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology at the start of 2024.
