

1500 Gortner Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108
United States
Yaniv Brandvain
Research statement
We are dedicated to understanding the origin, diversity, distribution of, and evolutionary forces active within, the flowering plants. Our group is fundamentally integrative, synthesizing genomic, theoretical, phylogenetic, comparative, molecular and field work to address these biological questions. We use genomic data to understand the history of divergence, adaptation, introgression and biogeography, and to aid in pant breeding and domestication. We use large-scale comparative analyses to reveal the major drivers of species diversity, phenotypic variation, and reproductive isolation in the flowering plants. We complement these genomic and comparative inferences with both functional analyses of the genetic and ecological bases of reproductive isolation, and basic population genomic theory to generate hypotheses and novel inference methods.
I encourage students, postdocs, and collaborators with a deep curiosity and interest in speciation, introgression, plant mating system evolution, and/or genomic conflicts and who are unafraid of maths, computers, pipettes and plants in their native range and are who are interested in a collegial and collaborative environment to contact me.
Education
- BA. College of the Atlantic. 2004
- PhD. Indiana University. 2010
- NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. University of California Davis. 2010 - 2013