Nina Overgaard Therkildsen
Principal Investigator
Nina is head of the lab. She is interested in using cost-effective full-genome screening with time series data to observe recent dynamics and microevolution in retrospective “real time”. She is also keenly interested in exploring ways to leverage genomic analysis for sustainable fisheries management and conservation.
Current Members
Pavel Dimens
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Pavel is interested in how fish movement over evolutionary time impacts and informs conservation genetics. His experience has been in highly migratory fishes in marine systems (sharks, tunas) and he has turned his attention to the anadromous American shad.
Kara Jones
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Kara’s background is in amphibian/reptile phylogenetics, population genetics, and phylogeography. She currently uses metagenomics to identify zooplankton and cyanobacteria from eDNA, and developing an epigenetic age prediction model for sturgeon.
Jaime Ortiz Pachar
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Jaime currently studies sea cucumber conservation genomics in the Galapgos. He is very passionate about conservation of the natural environment and strongly believes that genetic tools can play a more prominent role in driving sustainable policies around the world.
Heath Cook
PhD Candidate Link
Heath is interested in marine biomonitoring and developing methods to overcome the difficulties in sampling biodiversity in regions of the world with reduced research infrastructure. He is currently investigating environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding in marine systems as a tool for the detection of continental shelf biodiversity.
Azwad Iqbal
PhD Candidate Link
Azwad is interested in evolutionary genomics and conservation, with particular focus on invasive species and rapid evolution. His experience spans molecular ecology and disease vector neurogenetics, working in African savannas and with mosquitoes. His PhD research uses population genomics to understand the rapid adaptation of invasive American shad to new habitats on the Pacific coast of North America.
Yuqing Chen
PhD Candidate Link
Yuqing interested in evolution, molecular ecology, and conservation. She studies gene flow from domesticated (farmed) eastern oysters into wild populations using genomics. While Yuqing is technically in Matthew Hares lab, we consider her one of our own.
Past Members
Áki Jarl Láruson
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Áki is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on question of adaptation in the sea. His research interests generally relate to molecular evolution, especially in the context of marine ecology. In the Therkildsen lab he workied on the role of genomic architecture in local adaptation in Atlantic silversides, as well as the implementation of haplotagged sequence data to the American Shad.
Jessi Rick
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
While working with Nina, Jessi primarily studied Atlantic Silversides. After her post-doc, she became an Assistant Professor in the Wildlife Conservation and Management program in the University of Arizona.
Runyang 'Nicolas' Lou
Ph.D. Student Link
Nicolas is broadly interested in the application of genomic tools in the conservation and management of biodiversity. He studied the genomic basis of local adaption in the Atlantic cod, as well as the molecular mechanisms underlying its rapid evolution in response to size-selective fishing and climate change. He also created loco-pipe, the go-to tool for processing lcWGS data.
Arne Jacobs
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Arne focuses on using population genomic and functional genomic approaches for understanding the natural history, genetic basis and evolutionary history underlying the biodiversity we can see observe everywhere.During his time at Cornell, Arne worked on the population genomics of local adaptation and counter-gradient selection in Atlantic silversides.
Harmony Borchardt-Wier
Lab Manager Link
Harmony has been wrangling oysters in Matt Hare’s lab since 2008 and figuring out fish in Nina Therkildsen’s lab since 2016. She excels at being skeptical that her tubes of clear and colorless liquid contain DNA, extracting DNA from hard-to-reach places, and fighting with her computer to beat it into submission. She makes a mean plate diagram.
Aryn Wilder
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Aryn wants to understand the genomic characteristics that influence the adaptive potential of populations for the conservation of the planet’s biodiversity. During her time in Cornell University, Aryn studied local adaptation and rapid adaptation of fish in response to fisheries.
Anna Tigano
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Anna uses a combination of genomic approaches, including population and comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and research in the field and the lab to address what the genomic and physiological basis of adaptive traits is, how adaptive traits evolve and are maintained in a population, and the relative roles of structural variation and genome structure in adaptation.
Naoko Kurata
Postdoctoral Scholar Link
Naoko, integrates her profound respect for aquatic ecosystems into innovative research at the intersection of genomics and conservation. At Cornell University, Naoko led the development of a strategy to incorporate DNA-based ingredient tracing into the next generation of aquaculture feed sustainability certifications.
Maria Akopyan
Ph.D. Student Link
Maria was co-advised by Nina and Kelly Zamudio, where she combined population genomics, comparative linkage mapping, and quantitative trait loci mapping, Maria discovered that multiple locally adapted traits map to genomic regions that are highly differentiated between populations and overlap with multiple massive segregating chromosomal inversions. She did this through a large study on Atlantic Silversides that was recently published in Science! https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ady6774