My previous and ongoing research involves multimodal sexual selection, acoustic divergence, and speciation. For my PhD, I studied barn swallows in North America, Europe, and Asia to quantify variation in feather ornaments and song resulting from different targets of sexual selection across populations. As a postdoc at the University of Nebraska, I extended this work by developing a ‘phenotype network’ approach for visualizing and analyzing the functional evolution of sexual communication signals in barn swallows and Schizocosa wolf spiders.
Publications
To test hypotheses and predictions about patterns of autosomal and sex-linked genomic diversity and differentiation, we measured population genetic statistics within and between populations and subspecies of the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) and performed explicit comparisons between autosomal and Z-linked genomic regions…
Drew R. Schield, Elizabeth S. C. Scordato, Chris C. R. Smith, Javan K. Carter, Sidi Imad Cherkaoui, Sundev Gombobaatar, Said Hajib, Saad Hanane, Amanda K. Hund, Kazuo Koyama, Wei Liang, Yang Liu, Najib Magri, Alexander Rubtsov, Basma Sheta, Sheela P. Turbek, Matthew R. Wilkins, Liu Yu, Rebecca J. Safran