Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Faculty Adviser: Bernard Kim Year of Study: G2 Undergraduate School: Harvard University Undergraduate Major: Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
I grew up with 3 siblings and 2 dogs in the suburbs of Boston, MA. On the research side of things, I am excited about the diversity of insects, their interactions, behaviors, and the mechanisms that give rise to this diversity. My undergraduate research at Harvard showed the effect of soil sodium on the interactions of ants and their host-plants of an East African ant-plant mutualism. Post-grad, I lived in Japan for a year and a half and worked at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology on the morphology of specialized organs of caterpillars that are mutualistic with ants through micro-CT scanning and looked at multi-modal sensing in butterfly vision and flight through scanning and behavioral experiments. I love to go for hikes, surf, eat good food, or do anything crafty. My field research experiences as an undergrad were super formative for me, so I'd love to help undergrads here navigate that journey.
I think clocks should go counter-clockwise.
My research investigates how diversification and speciation occurs, with a focus on adaptive radiations. Adaptive radiations are the phenomena of a single species rapidly diversifying into many new species, each typically filling new ecological niches. Specifically, I am studying the radiation of Hawaiian Drosophila, which are thought to have diversified from a single fly into 1000 species (one-quarter of all Drosophila species). These flies are incredibly diverse in form, behavior, and host substrate, so I am interested in looking at the evolution of these traits across the phylogeny, and understanding what genomic and ecological mechanisms allow for such diversity. The ecology of these flies has been catalogued to an extent, but no one has looked at these flies with genomics. For my dissertation, I'll be combining field work to collect flies and observe their behavior and ecologies, wet-lab work like whole genome sequencing, and computational work to compare genomics and traits across the species. This work will help us better understand more generally what ecological and genomic conditions lead to speciation and diversification, which is a major theme in our field.
Not available to participate in Summer ReMatch+ program.
