Bryan Carstens

Research in my lab seeks to understand how biological diversity is generated using computational approaches. We investigate empirical systems by identifying the limits of evolutionary lineages, in order to evaluate the relative contributions of evolutionary processes and infer the ecological and environmental forces that have contributed to the formation of population genetic structure. Our goal is to generate realistic models of the historical demography and quantify the probability of these models given the genomic data that we collect. This evaluation provides a context for understanding how the evolutionary forces that act within or between populations (e.g., selection, drift, and gene flow) act to produce macro-evolutionary patterns.