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L. Lacey Knowles
Associate Professor
Associate Curator, Museum of Zoology
Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999
U-M affiliation(s)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Museum of Zoology
Contact information
University of Michigan
2085 Museums Building
1109 Geddes Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079
Phone: (734) 763-5603, office
(734) 763-7943, lab
Fax: (734) 763-4080
Email: knowlesl@umich.edu
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Fields of study
Speciation, sexual selection, phylogeography, and evolutionary radiations
Academic background
I received my Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona in 1999-2002.
Graduate students
Tim Connallon, Elen Oneal, Huateng Huang, Amanda Zellmer
Postdoctoral fellows
Tatiana Fedina, John McCormack
Visiting professor
Dr. Shengquan Xu, Institute of Zoology, Life Science College, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China
News
Systematic Biology June cover story
The June issue of Systematic Biology features the research of Professor L. Lacey Knowles and postdoctoral fellow, Bryan Carstens. Systematic investigations of recently derived species are often complicated by a conflict between the gene tree used to infer species relationships and the actual history of divergence, or the real species tree. This research helps to bridge that gap.
Contrary to misconceptions that such incongruence could not be overcome, or would require large-scale phylogenomic study with inordinate amounts of sequence data, the research demonstrates the utility of this approach with relatively modest sampling efforts that are feasible for most researchers. The relationship between the gene trees and the species phylogeny is modeled probabilistically rather than equating a gene tree with the species tree – and is an area of largely unexplored potential. This research represents an interesting and fundamental paradigm shift in how the evolutionary history of species diversification can be reconstructed.
Kudos to Knowles
Professor L. Lacey Knowles was awarded a three-year $314,000 grant by The National Science Foundation. The grant from the Population and Evolutionary Processes Program is titled “Population genetics of species delimitation: Methodology and application of a unified approach to inferring species boundaries."
Working with the Caribbean cricket genus Amphiacusta, Knowles will explore ways that population-genetic models and sampling design can improve the accuracy of inferred species boundaries, as well as detect the common signal of species boundaries inferred from different data types. The methods developed by the project will enable improved sampling design for a diversity of approaches used in defining the limits of species, including those applied in conservation biology and DNA-barcoding initiatives. The results of these analyses will also produce recommendations about how genetic data, including data from multiple loci, can be combined with other data types to produce a unified approach for recognizing species.
Research Education for Undergraduates award
Professor L. Lacey Knowles received a Research Education for Undergraduates (REU) award for an NSF grant “Testing speciation hyphotheses with genomic analyses in montane grasshoppers.” Student Lisa Martens will use new population genetic methods and sequence data from multiple loci to reconstruct the history of speciation during a radiation of montane grasshoppers from the Rocky Mountain sky islands.
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