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NSF Postdoctoral Fellow

tylerkchafin [at] gmail.com 

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Though once viewed as primarily antagonistic to the speciation process, hybridization is now increasingly viewed as widespread and playing a constructive role in adaptive evolution. Despite this, we know relatively little about how hybridization varies phylogenetically, and how it influences rates of speciation and extinction. My research seeks to understand the role of hybridization in species’ persistence or proliferation over both contemporary and macroevolutionary timescales by combining ’time-series’ population genomic sampling of specimens archived in natural history collections with large-scale phylogenetic network inference to identify trends in patterns of reticulation and diversification. I am also particularly interested in reducing computational barriers to hybridization research through development of new methods, and improving the accessibility/ scalability of existing methods.