University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

EEB graduate student Diego Alvarado Serrano has been awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on dissertation research and writing.

Alvarado Serrano studies diversification processes and evolutionary mechanisms underlying high tropical diversity, evolutionary responses to environmental heterogeneity, and long-term stability of ecological niches and its relationship to evolutionary limits of geographic ranges in the lab of Professor L. Lacey Knowles. “To address these questions, I combine analyses of molecular data from Sanger and Next-Generation sequencing and a combination of tools traditionally used in the fields of landscape genetics, phylogeography, species distribution modeling, and Global Information Systems,” he said. “As part of my work in this area, I collaborated with Lacey to develop an innovative approach that combines ecological, genetic, and demographic modeling to uncover the evolutionary consequences of climate-induced distributional shifts. Together these projects are expected to contribute to our understanding of the circumstances under which climatic and other environmental changes threaten species survival or promote their differentiation, and to improve available tools for the analysis of population differentiation and diversification.”

He will receive $28,200 over three terms, candidacy tuition and registration fees for fall and winter as well as GradCare health and dental insurance coverage for 2012-13. Congratulations!