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
Jaime Ortiz Pachar
Post Doctoral Scholar
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.
Pavel Dimens
Post Doctoral 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
Post Doctoral Scholar
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.
Heath Cook
PhD Candidate
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.
Past Members
Jessi Rick
Post Doctoral 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.
Arne Jacobs
Post Doctoral 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.
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
Aryn Wilder
Post Doctoral 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.
Harmony Borchardt-Wier
Lab Manager
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.
Runyang 'Nicolas' Lou
Ph.D. Student
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.
Áki Jarl Láruson
Post Doctoral 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.