Education:

Graduated Honors Biology student at the University of Iowa.

Research Interests:

My project focuses on fitness of flies that have different mitochondrial haplogroups, using Drosophila simulans as a model system.

I am conducting population cage studies competing D. simulans with different haplogroups against the white eyed mutant D. melanogaster line. I use three control siI and three control siIII lines. Two experimental lines have the siI haplogroup but the nuclear background of a line that was originally siIII has been introgressed for 12 generations. I have also included two lines of the reciprocal introgression. The point of these last four lines is to test fitness when the original mitonuclear interaction are interrupted.

This study is currently being expanded by Avis James.