Awarded NSF Postdoc Research Fellowship

I am thrilled to announce that I was recently awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology! I applied to several competitive fellowship programs and received generally positive feedback, but this was the first program that decided to extend an award to me for my research. This fellowship will provide three years of salary support and modest research funding to pursue a project focused on the evolutionary genomics of convergent limb reduction in the Australian lizard genus Lerista. I will pursue this work under the guidance of Scott Edwards at Harvard University and I am excited to immerse myself in a new, stimulating research environment at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I also get to spend significant amounts of time in Adelaide, Australia as part of my project working with collaborators Steve Donnellan, Mark Hutchinson, and Mike Lee, which will be a lot of fun. I have also arranged to learn cutting-edge micro-CT scanning techniques with Johannes Müller in Berlin. Special thanks, also, to my doctoral advisor Todd Castoe, whose mentorship was instrumental in my scientific and career development!

Updates: News of my award was released by the UTA College of Science and, due to my parents’ pride, my hometown newspaper The Post Journal.