Biography
I completed my undergraduate degree in Zoology at the University of Manchester in 2019. As part of my degree I spent a year working in the LOHE bioacoustics lab at the University of Hawai'i, Hilo where I worked on projects centred around behavioural ecology, community ecology and conservation of Hawaiian forests and forest birds.
After graduating I briefely completed a research project following on from my undergraduate dissertation focused on the effects of common marking techniques on mate choice and mating latency in Drosophila melanogaster and worked as an intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama rearing Heliconius butterflies and conducting behavioural experiments investigating the role of female mate choice during speciation.
I started my PhD on the genomics of adaptation and speciation in reef fishes separated by the Isthmus of Panama in 2021 as part of Andrea Manica's Evolutionary Ecology Group in the Department of Zoology. My PhD is co-supervised by Owen McMillan (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) and generously funded by the department Whitten Studentship.
Research
My PhD uses the unique, natural experiment of the Isthmus of Panama to understand how multiple previously continuous species of reef fishes, separated by the emergence of the isthmus around 3 million years ago, have adapted to the radically different environmental conditions in the Ocean basins of the Tropical Eastern Pacific and Carribean. Using this system I plan to investigate how the genomes of divided species have diverged and look for evidence of selection in areas of the genome associated with the different environmental conditions in each Ocean basin, as well as examining whether we see predictable changes in the genome across multiple different species pairs separated by the divide.
