Thrilled to have a new paper out where we use 12+ years of monitoring data to document the impacts of inbreeding on fitness in eastern massasauga rattlesnakes! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

On a final note, we're all very interested in getting feedback on this project - please reach out with thoughts, suggestions, reviews, questions, etc.!

Eric was an extraordinarily generous colleague and a deeply kind and curious person. We all miss him.

It's been a long road to get this project out, and I'm very thankful to have worked on it with such excellent humans and wonderful colleagues. I want to especially highlight Eric Crandall, who worked tirelessly on this project and tragically passed away before it came together.

We found support for some results in line with our predictions (e.g., diversity increases with range extent), and for some counterintuitive results (e.g., dispersal-related traits were positively correlated with diversity).

We then aggregated biotic and abiotic factors (e.g., dispersal traits, life history traits, and range features) for each species to test some classic hypotheses about what predicts genetic diversity across species.

We collected georeferenced genomic data from over 9,000 individuals from over 90 marine species and used a spatial population genetic model to estimate the genetic diversity of each species.

New preprint "Drivers of genetic diversity across the marine tree of life" out lead by my former postdoc Rachel Toczydlowski, along with @reidbrennan.bsky.social, Joanna Kelley, Jamie Pringle, @seaprof.bsky.social, and @johnwares.bsky.social.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Huge congrats to @kumawatb.bsky.social who was presented with his Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award from the Grad School today! Bhaskar is one of the most patient, thoughtful, and talented educators I've ever had the opportunity to work with, and he's never even been my GSI!

Wow that’s so cool! Thanks for letting me know!

Also, big thanks to Simon Gravel for the lovely perspective on our paper!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Really excited to see this work, led by Mike Grundler, published! It's a new method for inferring the geographic locations of shared genetic ancestors. In the paper, we and use it to infer the geographic history of human genetic ancestry

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...