STRI Short Term Fellow and doctoral student at PSU
I am a Biology Ph.D. graduate student in George (PJ) Perry’s Anthropological Genomics Lab at Penn State University. My dissertation research is focused on integrating morphological and evolutionary genomics techniques to characterize how human behavior impacts non-human evolutionary biology.
I am working with Aaron at STRI to collect modern, archaeological, and paleontological shell materials from Bocas del Toro. Strombus pugilis is a species of conch that has decreased in body size at maturity over the past ~7000 years possibly due to size-selective human subsistence pressures. I’ll export these shell samples, along with some modern tissue samples, back to PSU and attempt to extract and sequence both modern and ancient DNA from these materials.
One long-term goal is to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify genetic loci associated with body size variation in these marine snails. These loci could then be studied with evolutionary population genomic methods to test the hypothesis that small body size has evolved via a history of positive natural selection. If ancient DNA can be extracted and sequenced from the archaeo- and paleontological sites, it will be possible to directly track the evolutionary history of size-associated genetic variants over time, relative to genetic variants from other regions of the genome.
O'Dea Lab 
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