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.
Caroline Cauret
Ph.D. Candidate
Caroline completed her M.Sc. at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse (France) during which time she studied the impact of genomic location on the evolution of a multigene family in mammals. Her Ph.D. work is examining sex chromosome evolution in pipid frogs.
Xue Song
M.Sc. Candidate
Xue did her undergraduate work at McMaster, including a senior thesis project in the Evans lab.
For her M.Sc. project, Xue is studying several questions at the intersection between gene duplication, sex chromosome evolution, and gene expression in Xenopus.
Tharindu Premachandra
M.Sc. Candidate
Tharindu did his undergraduate work at the Department of Zoology in the University of Colombo.
For his M.Sc. project, Xue is sex determination in Xenopus using bioinformatics and gene editing approaches.
Veronica Lopardo
Undergraduate thesis student
For her senior thesis project, Veronica is exploring sex-linked genes in several Xenopus species.
Alumni:
Martin Knytl, Postdoc, now postdoc at Charles University
Sinthu Senthillmohan, Undergraduate thesis student, now a medical student at the University of Toronto
Ben Furman, Ph.D. graduate, now postdoc at the University of British Columbia
Xue Song, undergraduate
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 a postdoc at Yale University
Jake Esselstyn, postdoc, now an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University
Jane Shen, M.Sc. graduate, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hong Kong
Adam Bewick, Ph.D. graduate, now a postdoc at the University of Georgia
Freddy Chain, Ph.D. graduate, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
Iqbal Setiadi, Ph.D. candidate
Dave Anderson, M.Sc. graduate, now a postdoc at the University of British Columbia
Graham Colby, undergraduate, now a graduate student at the University of Ottawa
Karun Tandoon, undergraduate
Zach Hugh, undergraduate
Shireen Bliss, undergraduate
Simone Mendel, undergraduate
Mohammad Zubairi, undergraduate, now a physician
Laura Pin, undergraduate
Tia Harrison, undergraduate
Travis Fuchs, undergraduate
Christine Munro, undergraduate
Fayrouz Jamal, undergraduate
Stephanie Sun, undergraduate
Brady Tracey, undergraduate
Eliza Wojcik, undergraduate
