Dr. Joe Hereford completes NESCent post-doctoral fellowship


On December 31, 2006, Dr. Joe Hereford completed his NESCent post-doctoral fellowship. He has focused his research on the adaptive divergence between natural populations. Adaptive divergence between natural populations reflects responses to natural selection and the distribution of genetic variation in natural populations. The hypothesis of adaptive population divergence has been tested in a variety of taxa, but results of such studies are typically reported qualitatively. Such qualitative results belie the complexity of factors that contribute to the process of divergence. Using published reciprocal transplant experiments and metrics of adaptive divergence, he has compiled a comprehensive database of quantitative estimates of adaptive divergence and factors that might be associated with the degree of adaptive divergence. This database will be used to test hypotheses about the effects of factors such as mating system, range size, or environmental gradient on the degree of adaptive divergence between populations. Dr. Hereford has a new post-doctoral position at the University of Maryland, College Park, working with Charles Fenster on the evolution of reproductive isolation in Arabidopsis thaliana.
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