People

Ben Evans

 

Professor, Biology Department, McMaster University

Ben received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Columbia University in 1998 where he worked with Darcy Kelley and Don Melnick on hybrid zones in South Africa and Indonesia.   After this, he did a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin with Dave Cannatella, where he explored phylogenetics and phylogeography of fanged frogs in Southeast Asia.  He moved to McMaster in 2004, where he’s carried on with some of these projects and also initiated new research directions on duplicate genes, sex chromosomes, and transposable elements.  After receiving tenure in 2010, he spent a sabbatical year with Brian Charlesworth at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. In 2017-8 he did a second sabbatical year in the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Ben’s Google Scholar page.

 

Tharindu Premachandra

Ph.D. Candidate

Tharindu did his undergraduate work at the Department of Zoology in the University of Colombo. Tharindu is studying population genetics and sex determination in multiple Xenopus species using gene editing and bioinformatics.

 

 

 

Jianlong Zhu

M. Sc. candidate

Jianlong did his undergraduate work at Nanjing Agricultural University in China. At McMaster, he is studying sex chromosome evolution, gene expression, and genomics of the allotetraploid frog X. mellotropicalis using bioinformatics. Jianlong also has explored mitonuclear interactions in macaque monkeys.

 

 

 

 

Lindsey Kukoly

M. Sc. candidate

Lindsey did her undergraduate work at Trent University and is studying phenotypes of mutant Xenopus.

 

Emmanuela Anele

Visiting scholar and Ph.D. candidate; to arrive in mid-2022!

 

Alumni:

Caroline Cauret, PhD graduate, now postdoc at Oregon State University

Veronica Lopardo, undergraduate thesis student

Martin Knytl, Postdoc, now postdoc at Charles University

Xue Song, MSc student and undergraduate thesis student, now a bioinformatician at Cedar Sinai Medical Group

Sinthu Senthillmohan, Undergraduate thesis student, now a medical student at the University of Toronto

Ben Furman, Ph.D. graduate, now a Bioinformatician at Canexia Health

Conner Hurd, undergraduate

Hermina Ghenu, M.Sc. graduate, now a Ph.D. candidate at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal)

Brian Alcock, M.Sc. graduate, now a Research Technician at McMaster University

Nate Upham, postdoc, now an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University

Jake Esselstyn, postdoc, now an Associate Professor at Louisiana State University

Jane Shen, M.Sc. graduate, now a postdoc at U.C.S.F.

Adam Bewick, Ph.D. graduate, now a Genomics Scientist at Bayer Crop Science

Freddy Chain, Ph.D. graduate, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell

Iqbal Setiadi, Ph.D. candidate, now an Environmental Consultant

Dave Anderson, M.Sc. graduate, now an Instructor at the University of Calgary

Graham Colby, undergraduate, now a graduate student at the University of Ottawa

Karun Tandoon, undergraduate

Zach Hugh, undergraduate

Shireen Bliss, undergraduate

Simone Mendel, undergraduate, now a physician

Mohammad Zubairi, undergraduate, now a physician

Laura Pin, undergraduate

Tia Harrison, undergraduate; now a graduate student at the University of Toronto

Travis Fuchs, undergraduate

Christine Munro, undergraduate

Fayrouz Jamal, undergraduate

Stephanie Sun, undergraduate

Brady Tracey, undergraduate

Eliza Wojcik, undergraduate