Graduate Student

Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior

B.Sc., Case Western Reserve University, 2000

M.S., Case Western Reserve University, 2003

My broad research interests concern:        1. the costs and benefits of sexual reproduction and 2. the forces that enable or inhibit the reversibility of evolution. Using yeast as my model system, my dissertation specifically deals with how past reproductive history interacts with current reproductive history in influencing the response of populations to selective pressures. I have experimentally evolved unicellular yeast cells within distinct populations to become smaller. I have, then, reverse selected the cells to become larger.