Pryce Millikin, the current Master’s student in the Yoder Lab, has won not one but three external awards providing financial support for his thesis research. Pryce started in the lab last fall, and hit the ground running on a project to understand how climate variation might impact the specialized pollinators of Joshua trees, the yucca…
A new paper from the lab — coauthored with all three of the Yoder Lab’s graduate student alumni — is now online ahead of print in the journal Evolution Letters. In it, we analyze population genetic data from 20 pairs of plants and herbivores, parasites, and mutualists that live intimately on those plants to test for evidence that the associate species’…
Master’s student Cate MacGregor successfully defended her dissertation this morning. Cate’s thesis project uses RADseq data to look for evidence of local adaptation to climate in populations of moths so specialized that we know next to nothing about their lives when they’re not on their host plant — the pollinators of Joshua trees. Working from samples…
The Yoder Lab at CSUN is recruiting up to two Master’s students to start in Fall 2022, to develop thesis projects within our ongoing work on the evolutionary genomics of Joshua tree and its coevolution with specialized pollinators.
Earlier today, Master’s student Mikhail Plaza successfully defended his thesis research, in which he built a linkage map for Joshua tree and used it to reexamine data identifying genetic loci that may play a role in local adaptation to climate and to specialized pollinating yucca moths. Mikhail’s project is among the first fruits of the…
Master’s student Alby Dang successfully defended his thesis research, an examination of cooperative dynamics in the Joshua tree/yucca moth mutualism, in a public presentation and meeting with his thesis committee this morning. Alby was the first graduate student to join the Yoder Lab, interviewing for a position in summer 2017 and enrolling the next fall,…
I’m delighted to finally, officially announce that the lab has received funding from the National Science Foundation — for a big, collaborative endeavor we’ve been calling the Joshua Tree Genome Project. Collaborative grants to us here at CSUN and to Chris Smith’s lab at Willamette University, with subawards to collaborators at USGS and the Universities of…
My lab at California State University, Northridge, is open for Master’s students enrolling for the 2018-19 school year. I’m building a research program focused on the coevolution of interacting species, particularly how mutualists shape each others’ genomic diversity, and how interactions between species can help or hinder adaptation to abiotic factors like climate. You should…
