Welcome to Phil Douchinsky

  • September 13, 2021
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I’m excited to welcome Phil Douchinsky to the Puckett Lab!  Phil had been working as a research technician on a conservation genomics project looking at gene flow in fish across the landscape. For his MS, he will compare and contrast isolation by resistance of black (Ursus americanus) and brown (U. arctos) bears across the Southeastern […]

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Puckett Lab Hosts Mark Edwards for Seminar

  • October 29, 2020
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The Puckett Lab hosted Dr. Mark Edwards for seminar. Dr. Edwards is the Curator of Mammalogy at the Royal Alberta Museum and studies the ecology of carnivores and large herbivores in northern temperate and Holarctic environments. His talk was titled, “Museum Collections Cast New Light on Spatial Ecology of Extant Species.”

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Puckett Lab Hosts Loren Cassin Sackett for Seminar

  • October 15, 2020
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The Puckett Lab hosted Dr. Loren Cassin Sackett for seminar. Dr. Cassin Sackett studies how introduced parasites affect genomic diversity and population persistence in native wildlife populations. Her talk was titled, “The consequences of introduced pathogens on host evolution” and focused on studies in prairie dogs and Hawai’i ‘amakihi.

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Welcome to Heather Clendenin

  • January 10, 2020
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Very excited to welcome Heather Clendenin to the Puckett Lab!  Heather recently finished her MS at the University of Idaho where she investigated sibling relatedness in gray wolves (Canis lupus).  For her PhD, she will estimate genetic load in black bear (Ursus americanus) populations with varying demographic histories.

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Puckett Lab Hosts Marc Tollis for Seminar

  • November 7, 2019
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The Puckett Lab hosted Dr. Marc Tollis for seminar. Dr. Tollis studies cancer evolution within mammals, transposable elements, and has broader interests in the systematics of vertebrates. His talk was titled, “Tempo and mode of Peto’s Paradox: Comparative genomics and the evolution of cancer suppression.”

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Puckett Lab Hosts Greg Barsh for Seminar

  • April 11, 2019
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The Puckett Lab hosted Dr. Greg Barsh for seminar. Dr. Barsh is a Faculty Investigator at HudsonAlpha and Professor at Stanford University. He studies the genetic basis of mammalian coat color and patterning (e.g. stripes, spots) variation. His talk was titled, “Stripes and spots: Genetics of mammalian color pattern.”

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Puckett Lab Hosts Emily Latch for Seminar

  • February 7, 2019
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The Puckett Lab hosted Dr. Emily Latch for seminar. Dr. Latch is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She studies phylogeography and landscape genetics of several mammal species, with an emphasis on using this information to inform management. Dr. Latch met with the students in the Urban Ecology & Wildlife Management class, […]

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Welcome to Matthew Pollard

  • January 15, 2019
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Very excited to welcome Matthew Pollard to the Puckett Lab!  Matthew recently finished his MS at Cardiff University where he was investigating the Y-chromosome of brown bears (Ursus arctos).  For his PhD, he will work on comparative genomics of bears.

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Puckett Lab Opening Fall 2018 at the University of Memphis

  • May 11, 2018
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I am ecstatic to join the faculty at the University of Memphis as an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department.  The Puckett Lab will open Fall 2018 and focus on phylogeography and evolutionary genomics within the bear family. If you are interested in joining the lab, please see the “Positions in the Lab” page for […]

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Making conStruct Input Files

  • May 2, 2018
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As part of my postdoc with Gideon Bradburd, I’m using his new software package conStruct (bioRxiv; GitHub) to analyze dozens of genomic datasets.  conStruct requires three input files: 1) genetic data, 2) coordinate data (longitude in the first column, latitude in the second), and 3) a pairwise distance matrix with the same number of sites […]

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