The red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren, is non-native, invasive ant that arrived in the United States in the 1930s. It is now distributed throughout the southern US where it is found in both urban and rural habitats. The American dog tick, Dermacentor variabilis (Sa…
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Theraphosidae, commonly known as tarantulas, represent some of the most charismatic spiders on the planet. With almost 1000 described species, they have colonized the subtropics of every continent and have adapted to fill many of ecological niches. I address gaps in our understa…
A repeated theme in speciation is reproductive isolation centered around divergence in few, highly variable traits, specially in cases without strong geographic isolation and high speciation rates. Understanding the genomic basis of highly variable traits that are key to speciat…
Dynamic climatic oscillations during the Pleistocene had profound effects on the distribution of species across North America. Although the role of historical climate change on speciation remains controversial, the impact on genetic variation within species has been well documen…
In addition to the sex-determining gene SRY and several other single-copy genes, the human Y chromosome harbors nine multi-copy gene families which are expressed exclusively in testis. In humans, these gene families are important for spermatogenesis and their loss is observed in…
Little is known about the molecular diversity of the phytoplankton inhabiting the fjords of the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), despite the status of this region as being among the most vulnerable to future warming. Additionally, there are many gaps in our knowledge of how polar…
Microorganisms and complex microbial communities are an integral and essential component of engineered water systems designed to improve public health, maintain ecosystem health, and provide optimal water infrastructure and quality. Activated sludge systems are designed to enric…
Cerambycid (longhorn) beetles are diverse in their morphology and life history traits, but all share the common trait of being larval plant-borers. The larvae bore into and develop inside various plant tissues thus they can potentially cause significant economic and ecological d…
The current dissertation project integrates revisionary taxonomy, comparative morphology, molecular phylogenetics and comparative evolutionary analyses to investigate the diversity and evolution of assassin bugs, focusing on the Malagasy Bekilya group (Peiratinae) and the New Wo…
One of the fundamental questions in biology is the origin of species. Considerable insights into the processes that drive speciation have come from ancient lake systems. In this thesis, I present insights into speciation processes by investigating the species radiations of the a…
The study of systematics is a framework for the understanding of the natural world by generating units of biodiversity and relatedness between and among groups. My project focused on two studies: resolving the hierarchical placement and diversity of Palearctic naked-toed geckos …
In dieser Arbeit entwickeln wir schnellere exakte Algorithmen (schneller bezüglich der Worst-Case-Laufzeit) für Spezialfälle von Graphproblemen. Diese Algorithmen beruhen größtenteils auf dynamischem Programmieren und auf 2- SAT-Programmierung . Dynamisches Programmieren beschre…
Global patterns of biodiversity intrigue biologists to investigate their origins and common mechanisms and causes underlying the patterns through studies of evolutionary histories, processes, drivers that might have shaped the patterns of species diversification. The eastern Asi…
Reconstructing evolutionary trees, also known as phylogenies, from molecular sequence data is a fundamental problem in computational biology. Classically, evolutionary trees have been estimated over a set of species, where leaves correspond to extant species and internal nodes c…
Pyricularia oryzae (rice blast fungus) is one of the most prevalent and devastating diseases effecting rice agriculture today. Despite its impact on the economy of the globe, not much is known about the evolution of the avirulence genes within the fungus that triggers host defen…
Figs (Ficus carica) are one of the earliest domesticated plants and are grown in tropical and subtropical areas of world. Fig mosaic disease (FMD) is a virus disease affecting figs worldwide. In this study I attempted to determine the etiology of FM. To achieve this I used RNA a…
The tropical, flowering shrubs in the genus Erythroxylum (230 species) are commonly known as coca. For 8,000 years, two Erythroxylum species have been exploited for their production of cocaine. Coca plants remain culturally significant and economically important. Yet, their orig…
Reduviidae (assassin bugs), the largest clade of predatory non-holometabolous insects (∼6,800 species), display a range of prey specializations and members of one subfamily, the Triatominae, feed on vertebrate blood and are the vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi. A combination of phyl…
In my dissertation I examined the best-studied leafflower clade, the genus Glochidion, with 300 described species distributed from Pakistan to Japan, south to Australia, and east to the Pitcairn Islands. Because of their high species diversity and presumably complex biogeographi…