Nathan W. Anderson
PhD Candidate in Integrative Biology
BS in Applied Mathematics Texas A&M December 2019
Research
I currently am pursuing my PhD under the advisement of Dr. Aaron Ragsdale (Dept. of Integrative Biology) at UW - Madison. The Ragsdale lab studies human history, demographic inference, and broad areas of theoretical population genetics. My current research interests lie in understanding how selection on high-level phenotypes translates to interactions and/or interference at the genomic level. In particular, I am modelling how changing demography, selection, and linkage influence genomic variation. Such models can be leveraged to find the most likely demographic and selective history of a population without resorting to forward-in-time simulations.
Previously, I worked under Dr. Carol Lee (UW-Madison, Dept. of Integrative Biology), studying climate-adaptation and range expansions in marine copepods. My work focused on the development of time-series methods to infer gene-gene interactions and the modelling of complex trait evolution in a changing environment (Stern, Anderson, et al 2022). As an undergraduate researcher, I worked under Dr. Heath Blackmon (Texas A&M University; Dept. of Biology) from 2017 to Spring 2020. The Blackmon lab has a broad focus in evolutionary biology but much of the research focuses on sex chromosomes, genome structure, and population genetics. My research project in this lab involved phylogenetics and population genetic modelling, namely, the development of methods to partition phenotypes into dominance components (Armstrong, Anderson, and Blackmon 2019) and the statistical analysis of discrete and continuous trait evolution in a phylogenetic framework (Anderson et al 2020).