I am a biology Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University broadly interested in evolutionary and conservation genomics. My research integrates fieldwork, genome assembly, and population genomics/genetics to understand how species evolve, adapt, and persist in changing environments, particularly focusing on non-model insects such as endangered and endemic beetles.

My work often begins with developing genomic resources, including high-quality reference genomes using long-read sequencing, which serve as foundations for deeper population-level analyses. Then, I map short read whole genome sequences to the referencethe reference genome I assembled to investigate genetic diversity, population structure, and demographic history, with an eye toward informing conservation strategies. I am especially interested in how small, isolated populations differ genetically from larger ones, and how selection and drift shape their genomes over time.

Earlier in my Ph.D., I also looked at some big picture evolutionary questions like how sex chromosomes and chromosome numbers evolve in beetles. That project focused on fitting models to large comparative datasets to understand broad patterns in beetle karyotypes. One interesting thing we found was that scarab beetles show more fusions between sex chromosomes and autosomes than you'd expect, which could have some cool implications for how their genomes evolve over time.