Evolution of biotic interactions

Black Lives Matter! We denounce racism in all of its forms.
We are committed to dismantling white supremacy in the United States, academia and STEM.​
WE WELCOME AND ARE COMMITTED TO SUPPORTING BLACK AND OTHER MINORITIZED STUDENTS IN OUR LAB.
​​CLICK >>>HERE<<< FOR MORE ON WHAT WE ARE DOING IN SUPPORT OF THESE EFFORTS.

CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT OUR "MONARCH FLY" CRISPR RESEARCH PAPER

Welcome
​The Whiteman Laboratory is at the University of California, Berkeley is within the Department of Integrative Biology and is affiliated with the Center for Computational Biology, Essig Museum of Entomology, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and University and Jepson Herbaria. 

Our research follows from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, who focused on the evolution of new traits shaped by ecological interactions between organisms, whether within or between species. Such interactions are an evolutionary crucible in which new adaptations are forged, increasing the fitness of their bearers. Traits arising from intraspecific competition, host-parasite, predator-prey and mutualistic interactions are often more straightforward to study than those shaped by the abiotic environment because their genomic architectures tend to be simpler, and their evolutionary histories more dynamic. Species interactions can also drive the evolution of reproductive isolation, resulting in the origin of new species.

We use interdisciplinary approaches to study the role that species interactions play in driving the evolution of new adaptations and new species. We address these questions by integrating our research across levels of biological organization, using tools from behavior, biochemistry, chemical ecology, comparative anatomy/morphology/physiology, computational biology, evolution of development, genetics (including CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing), genomics, molecular and cellular biology, plant biology, phylogeny and neuroscience. We study systems involving plant-animal and plant-animal-microbial interactions.

Lab news
July-August 2020
-Dr. Marianna Karageorgi moves to Professor Dmitri Petrov's lab at Stanford to continue studying insect-toxin evolution!
-Dr. Rebecca Duncan just successfully made the cross-country trip to return to her childhood home in Atlanta!
-Noah and Professor Mary (Cassie) Stoddard were awarded a new four-year NSF grant to study Broad tailed hummingbird biology at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Princeton University and UC-Berkeley!
-Noah was awarded a California Conservation Genomics Project grant to study the genomic basis of co-adaptation in the California Pipevine and California Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly!
-Jessica Aguilar and Noah Whiteman were awarded a mentee-mentor HHMI Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Study designed "to build inclusive lab environments and helping increase diversity among the next generation of scientists." 

May-July 2020
-Saron Akalu (undergraduate student) was accepted to the UC-Berkeley Integrative Biology undergraduate program!
-Kirsten Verster (Ph.D. candidate) was accepted as a Graduate Remote Instruction Innovation Fellow for the summer!
-Julianne Peláez (Ph.D. candidate) won a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the Embassy of France in the United States to travel to France and collaborate with Professor Fredéric Marion Poll on gustatory functional evolution in Scaptomyza! Julianne also led a France-Berkeley Fund collaborative proposal that was funded to further strengthen the collaboration between the Marion Poll lab and our lab!
-Diler Haji (Ph.D. student) was awarded a Graduate Research Excellence Grant -- the R.C. Lewontin Early Award, from the Society for the Study of Evolution for his research on evolutionary genomics!
-Nicolas Alexandre (Ph.D. candidate) was awarded a Philomathia Fellowship from UC-Berkeley for his research on hummingbird adaptation!
-Shivani Sundaram (undergraduate student) will be attending medical school at University of Southern California in Fall 2020!

March-April 2020
-Kirsten Verster (Ph.D. candidate) won the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from UC-Berkeley!
-Diler Haji (Ph.D. student) won the Short-Term Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Fellowship to study tropical fruit flies and inversions!
-Jessica Aguilar (Ph.D. candidate) was awarded Big C Funds from UC-Berkeley for inclusiveIB initiative in Integrative Biology!
-Dr. Tim O'Connor (former Ph.D. candidate) landed a three year NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from NIH to work with Professor Marcus Kronforst (and in collaboration with Professors Joy Bergelson and Joe Thornton) at University of Chicago!
-Julianne Peláez (Ph.D. candidate) won a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research!
-Dr. Teruyuki Matsunaga (Postdoctoral fellow)  won a  Uehara Memorial Foundation Research Fellowship!
-Professor Noah Whiteman was awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship on April 8th!

Why do we study biotic interactions?