Research Interests

My work to date reflects my ongoing research interests of how organisms adapt to environmental change, the underlying mechanisms, and implications for population persistence. During my PhD, I investigated factors that promote and constrain adaptation in populations that inhabit alpine temporary streams. Specifically, the effects of stream drying selection pressures on ecological divergence (phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation) of populations of an alpine aquatic insect, the constraining influence of gene flow among populations originating from streams of differing hydroperiod, and the population genetic consequences of stream drying induced extinction and recolonisation events. During my first year as a PostDoc, I assessed the relative importance of additive genetic, environmental, and neutral genetic effects on latitudinal variation of thermal reaction norms of growth rate for populations of the damselfly, Ischnura elegans. I found that at the interpopulation level, reaction norms differed primarily in elevation, suggesting that shorter growth seasons in both high latitude and bivoltine populations select for faster growth rates. Within populations, heritable variation for growth rate, as well as genetic variance for plasticity suggest that reaction norms are free to evolve. I also demonstrated that selection rather than drift is the main contributor to population divergence in growth rate (QST > FST), and that QST estimates were sensitive to environment and genotype by environment (GxE) interactions. In my second year as a PostDoc, I was involved in two research projects: (1) evolution of parthenogenesis in Swiss populations of the psychid bagmoth, Dahlica triquetrella, and (2) marker development of MHC class IIB genes and metagenomics of European plaice. Currently, I am working on the evolutionary potential and thermal reaction norms of marine host-parasite interactions, using marine sticklebacks and Vibrio sp. bacteria as a model system.