Understanding the evolutionary processes that have shaped contemporary biodiversity patterns of reptiles and amphibians is a core research focus of our lab. Currently we rely on genome-scale data, such as thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), to achieve appropriate power and signal to infer demographic parameters such as gene flow, population size, and divergence. Several projects in the lab include (1) Reference-based species delimitation in North American lizards (NSF funded in collaboration with Dr. Adam Leaché and Dr. Sonal Singhal) (2) Comparative phylogeography of reptiles and amphibians in west and central Africa (NSF funded in collaboration with Dr. Adam Leaché); (3) Comparative phylogeography of Texas that involves several taxa, including whiptails, earless lizards, barking frogs, and whipsnakes; (4) mitochondrial genome evolution in squamates.
