Postdoctoral Associate | Amphibian Metamorphosis Applied Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Behavioral Ecology Conservation Evolution Functional Genomics & Transcriptomics Population Genetics |
Welcome to my website! I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. I came to Louisville in June 2011 to work with my friend and mentor, Dr. David H. Reed; however, with Dr. Reed's passing, I am currently working independently.
I began my academic career at Piedmont College, where I developed an interest in herpetology, vertebrate natural history, and ecology. I then studied behavioral ecology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette under Dr. Robert G. Jaeger. After completing my master's degree at UL, Lafayette, I received training in population and conservation genetics at Washington and Lee University by working with Dr. David Marsh and Dr. Paul Cabe on a NSF-funded conservation genetics project. In December 2009, I received my PhD from the University of Kentucky, where I studied the comparative endocrinology and functional genomics of salamander metamorphosis under Dr. S. Randal Voss.
My research and teaching interests span the gamut of my scientific training. However, I have a special interest in using molecular markers to better understand behavioral and population processes and applied problems in conservation biology. I am also very interested in using transcriptomic techniques to gain insight into the molecular underpinnings of life history variation and how environmental factors influence developmental timing. While I generally use salamanders as models to address questions of interest, I am currently a participant in several collaborative projects on other taxa. For example, I am working with Dr. George Gale and colleagues to use microsatellite markers to investigate the relationship between cooperative breeding and relatedness in the puff-throated bulbul. I am also working with Ken Sterling (Doctoral student at Utah State University) to examine genetic diversity and population structure in the severely range-restricted blueface darter. In addition, I am collaborating with Dr. Cindy Corbitt, who is using microarrays and high throughput sequencing to examine how glyceollins affect gene expression in mice. Finally, I am working with Dr. Reed's former graduate students (Jared Wood & Victoria Prescott) to help them develop their respective dissertation projects. Jared is working on the population and conservation genetics of invasive lizards in Florida and Victoria is developing a project on the ecological genetics of wolf spiders.
In addition to my interests in population and conservation genetics and the molecular underpinnings of developmental variation, I also maintain an active interest in statistical computing. Recently, Dr. Arnold J. Stromberg and I submitted a small research grant (R03) to the NIH, in which we request funding to develop R code that will help researchers analyze gene expression data based on real-time PCR technology in more appropriate ways.
Last Updated 21 March 2012
Last Updated 21 March 2012