I am a graduate student in David McCauley's lab where we study a variety of aspects of plant evolutionary biology. My doctoral work has focused on a rare and endangered sunflower species, Helianthus verticillatus, that is known to only four locations in the world. The species is native to the southeastern United States and is a candidate for federal listing on the Endagered Species Act. I have asked several questions regarding its rarity specifically how does this extreme rarity affect both the population genetics and the fitness of these few populations. I employ gene-based microsatellites or EST-SSRs that were devoloped in the domesticated sunflower, H. annuus, as well as greenhouse crossing experiments to study the conservation genetics of this rare species.
Additional research that I am involved in is related to mitochondrial population genetics in the introduced weed Silene vulgaris. This species is a gynodioecious, perennial native to Europe in which we are currently studying heteroplasmy, non-maternal inheritance, and recombination in the mitochondrial genome.
