Integrating genetics, behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology to study the genetic causes and consequences of reproductive behavior.
Lab Members
Ben Sandkam, PhD
Assistant Professor
Ben is interested in the interplay between genome evolution and mating behaviors. He earned a BS in Integrative Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. In 2016 he completed his PhD in Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University, where he studied the interplay between color vision and mate preferences. Next, he studied the genomic processes that shape rapid evolution of color vision as a postdoc with Karen Carleton at the University of Maryland, and as a visiting scientist at the NIH. He went on to receive a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Judith Mank at the University of British Columbia, where he explored how genome evolution supports polymorphic reproductive strategies.
Matt Taves, PhD
Research Associate
Steroid hormones are orchestrators of organismal biology, coordinating physiology, behavior, and neural action based on developmental and environmental context. Matt studies how diverse mechanisms of steroid signaling generate tissue- and cell-specific transcriptomic responses to generate adaptive phenotypes.
Helen Stec
NBB Graduate Student
Helen is interested in brain and retinal morphological and genetic differences between the Poecilia parae sexes and morphs, and visual processing in general. In 2022, Helen earned a BS in Neuroscience from Ohio University.
Maximiliano Zuluaga Forero
NBB Graduate Student
Max comes from Colombia, the most beautiful and biodiverse country on earth. There he got interested in the genetic mechanisms that lead to behavior and shape the evolution of organisms. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Biology in 2019 at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and has been training in neuroscience tools useful to study how genes determine how animals behave. Max is now working to understand how epigenetic mechanisms shape the genome expression across the different male morphs of Poecilia parae.
Lynn Capani-Czebiniak
Technician
Undergraduates in the lab
Neel Mehta
Phillip Zhuang
Ava Atienza
Sri Sai Akkineni
Eric Li
Kristin Tsay
Grace Zhang
Alanna Moskowitz
Maya Jarolem