Undergraduate Junior - genetics; microbiology

University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

I am an undergraduate in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of MN.  I am getting a double major in genetics and microbiology, with the hope of going to graduate school.  I joined the team during the spring of 2011 after taking a year off to ride horses professionally.  Through graduate school and beyond, I want to continue asking fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and help increase the public's understanding of science. 

I work with multicellular Saccharomyces cerevisiae, examining adaptation during long-term selection for rapid settling. My work involves the interactions between historical contingency, the adaptive landscape, and the evolution of novel traits (with special attention to a multicellular context). By exploiting intrinsic conflicts within multicellular S. cerevisiae, novel survival strategies—cellular division of labor being one of these—may be selected for.