People
Current members
Emma Goldberg
I was a grad student with Russ Lande at UC San Diego, then a postdoc with Bill Fagan at Univ Maryland, and then a postdoc with Boris Igić at Univ Illinois Chicago, before I joined the faculty of the department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior at Univ Minnesota. Now I’m taking my evolutionary thinking in new directions at Los Alamos National Lab.
Orlando Schwery
Orlando started his postdoc position in fall 2019, after (well, technically before…) getting his PhD from Univ Tennessee, Knoxville. He is working on phylogenetic comparative methods, especially tests of model adequacy.
Past lab members at UMN
Tanjona Ramiadantsoa
Tanjona joined the lab as a postdoc in fall 2014. He did his PhD work at Univ Helsinki, working on models for ecological, macroevolutionary, biogeographic, and conservation questions. His work here included an elegant and ambitious model of insect physiology, inspired by inquiry in range limit determinants.
After UMN: postdoc at UW Madison
Heath Blackmon
Heath joined the lab as a postdoc in summer 2015, for a collaborative project with Itay Mayrose on chromosome number evolution. He got his PhD at UT Arlington, using comparative methods to study genome evolution, especially of sex chromosomes, especially in beetles.
After UMN: faculty at Texas A&M
Will Freyman
Will joined the lab as a postdoc at the beginning of 2018. His biology graduate studies at UC Berkeley were preceded by other artistic and technical careers. He works on computational phylogenetics with a very strong Bayesian slant.
After UMN: researcher at 23andMe
Rosana Zenil-Ferguson
Rosana joined the lab as a postdoc at the beginning of 2018. She started off in statistics and then moved over to evolutionary biology, as a grad student at Univ Florida and then a postdoc at Univ Idaho. With us, she worked on phylogenetic models of joint evolution of breeding system and ploidy.
After UMN: faculty at Univ Hawaii
Alex Harkness
Alex joined EEB as a grad student in fall 2015, co-advised with Yaniv Brandvain. He was previously an undergrad and herbarium intern at the University of Washington. He is interested in anything to do with mating system evolution, and his current projects include modeling transitions from selfing to outcrossing and the origin of new self-incompatibility alleles.
Jordan Koch
Jordan joined us in fall 2017, working as a researcher and programmer. She came with math and economics degrees from Univ Kansas, and biology research experience there and subsequently at AMNH and the John Innes Centre. She worked on our trait management database and RevBayes development.
After: math-teaching MS at UMN
Josh Justison
Josh was a biology major and computer science minor at UMN and joined us in 2016. He worked with Heath on phylogenetic models of chromosome evolution and then progressed to an independent project about the influence of non-sister gene flow on node ages.
After UMN: grad school at Iowa State
Anna Nagel
Anna was a biology major at UMN with mathematical inclinations. She joined the lab in 2016 for independent research and an honors thesis. Her project is developing a model of environment-dependent reinforcement, inspired by spadefoot toads.
After UMN: grad school at UC Davis
Mansi Bezbaruah
Mansi was a math major at UMN, with an interest in biology and computer science. She worked with us on manipulating tree data structures and simulating stochastic processes on them.
After UMN: grad school at Texas A & M
Tim Ohlert
Tim studied environmental science, plant biology, and forest ecosystem management at UMN, and he joined the lab in 2015. He worked on an island biogeography UROP project in the theme of Baker’s law, investigating how breeding system and island distance shape species compositions on islands.
After UMN: grad school at Univ New Mexico
Sai Sunkam
Sai was a computer science and math major at UMN. He joined us in 2015, developing a flexible Django web application to manage data on species traits and the literature from which it is derived.
After UMN: grad school at USC