Cornell University Department of Natural Resources

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Welcome - Hare Lab

Research Interests:
Population and conservation genetics of marine organisms, invasion biology, phylogeography, and host-parasite co-evolution.

Research Goals:
My research goals are to understand the ecological, demographic and historical processes that generate population substructure and species diversity in coastal marine ecosystems, and to make these findings relevant to conservation and management when possible. In marine environments there are few absolute barriers to dispersal, yet population genetic substructure and cryptic species are common in marine taxa with high dispersal potential. This implicates cryptic physical barriers to dispersal or strong diversifying selection generating population substructure. My work focuses on both these possibilities by using genetic markers to test for larval retention and nonrandom gene flow limiting population admixture, and by testing for the effects of natural selection at both genetic and phenotypic levels. Conventional means of studying these population processes are made difficult in the diverse taxa studied in the Hare lab because of their small size (e.g., invertebrate larvae, protozoan parasites, copepods), phenotypic plasticity of adults, or parasitic life cycles. By analyzing genetic variation using approaches from population genetics, phylogeography and landscape ecology, my research overcomes some of these obstacles and infers population processes affecting spatial connectivity at both ecological and evolutionary time scales. My applied conservation genetics research focuses these approaches on species/populations of concern or involves development of genetic tools to support conservation and restoration goals.

Graduate Student Recruiting

I recruit graduate students through Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology graduate fields. I am particularly interested in graduate school applicants with one or more of the following skill sets from which to build empirical population genetic expertise: computational biology, parasitology/pathology, molecular biology. Your choice of graduate field to apply through will depend on your research and career interests. Please contact me for more information and to find out if I am recruiting this year.