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.
Read MoreI 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 […]
Read MoreAs 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 […]
Read MoreI want to use BayesAss on a large SNP dataset generated with RADseq. But I found out when I went to convert the data into the .immaq format that my favorite converter, PGDspider, would only convert the first 40 loci. I didn’t get 10,000s of loci for nothing, so that wasn’t going to work. But […]
Read MoreIn 2008 I graduated with my MS from Larry Smart’s Lab at SUNY-ESF. Larry gives his students a personalized graduation gift, something that reflects the rapport he had with each student. Mine included a hunter green sweatshirt, a hunter green picnic blanket, and a green water bottle because as he said, “she needs more green […]
Read MoreToday is the first day of my postdoc with Jason Munshi-South at Fordham University! I’m super excited about starting this position and not just because I get to go to work everyday in a mansion (see below). The Munshi-South Lab focuses on adaptation to the urban environment. I think this is a really unique way […]
Read MoreLast year I applied for NSF’s Postdoc utilizing museum collections, the first year for that particular competition. My colleagues have started asking for advice on applying, so I went to NSF’s awards website and saw the types of projects they funded. I summarize a few results below. In 2015, there were 56 proposals submitted and […]
Read MoreAt this point, who hasn’t read Patterson et al 2006 about population structure and eigenvector analysis? It’s a great paper as it introduced the EIGENSOFT package for analyzing genomic data using principal components analysis (PCA). PCA is a great way to identify both population structure and admixture relationships. For anyone that works with microsatellites, you […]
Read MoreI’m new to Perl so this may not be the most elegant script. The script converts fastPHASE output into a ChromoPainter input file. The for loop makes an input file for each scaffold for which my data maps to (in my case 284 scaffolds of the polar bear genome). #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use […]
Read MoreI wanted to enter the Dance Your PhD contest since before I was accepted into a PhD program! Although never formally trained in dance, I did dance on my high school’s team and generally enjoyed the process. So Dance Your PhD seemed totally up my alley combining art and science. I had the vision for my […]
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