A huge congratulations to Erik Iverson, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation last week. Erik was the first PhD student to join the lab and is also the first one to successfully defend. He has been incredibly productive during his time in the lab, authoring over a dozen publications, receiving multiple grants/fellowships, and mentoring a score of successful undergraduates. I am so proud of him!!!
Erik’s dissertation is titled “Implications of mitochondrial genetics and physiology for biogeography and conservation” and focuses on how processes in the mitochondria influence environmental adaptation, speciation, and responses to a changing world. His four main chapters include:
*An analysis of whether mtDNA has undergone adaptive changes in high elevation animals – published in Molecular Biology and Evolution
*A perspective piece on using mitochondrial replacement techniques and gene-editing technology in order to “pre-adapt” animals to climate change – published in Evolutionary Applications
*An experiment in natural populations of swordtail fishes with known mitonuclear incompatibilities that asks how fishes with different genetic backgrounds respond to changes in temperature – publication is in prep
*A field experiment on tapaculos birds in the Andes that demonstrates how mitochondrial and whole-organism physiology changes across species that replace each other with elevation – publication is in prep
Although I could go on and on about Erik, I’ll just end by mentioning how independent he’s been throughout his dissertation. He’s done projects in three new experimental systems (tapaculos, swordtail fishes, and tit mice), got funds to largely support his entire dissertation, and brought several undergrads into the field with him for a crazy-hard amount of fieldwork.
He’ll be acting as a field instructor for Wildlands Studies over the next year before moving onto a postdoc and hopefully starting his own lab eventually.