Welcome - Hare Lab
Research Interests:
Population and conservation genetics of marine organisms, invasion biology, phylogeography, and host-parasite co-evolution.
Matt Hare
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.
Hare Lab at the Cornell Dairy
Contact Information
Dr. Matthew Hare
Associate Professor
Dept of Natural Resources
208 Fernow Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
email: mph75@cornell.edu
Office phone: 1-607-255-5685
Fax: 1-607-255-0349
Lab:
213 Bradfield Hall
Lab phone: 1-607-255-7615
Other marine science faculty and programs at Cornell include:
Chris
Clark, Lab of Ornithology
Additional Affiliations
Laura Eierman and Nicole Kollars take samples of oyster tissue.

