I am currently a PhD candidate and Madison & Lila Self Graduate Fellow in the Moyle Lab, at the University of Kansas. I am currently in the process of applying for post-doctoral opportunities with a target start date of August 2024.
I am an evolutionary biologist, and my fundamental goal is to use the genomes of extant organisms to understand how biodiversity has evolved (hint: it’s speciation!). My research program is foundationally built on understanding the evolutionary relationships among groups of closely related organisms. After my PhD, I hope to continue developing a handful of focal systems where I will use genomic tools to continue asking questions like: How is reproductive isolation maintained depsite geographic contact? What factors contribute to reduced interspecific fertility and/or reduced fitness in F1 hybrids? When phenotypic differences are important for maintaining species boundaries, do the regions of the genome encoding these differences play an important role in reproductive isolation?
I am passionate about reproducibility and accessibility in science, and I do my best to make my published work fully reproducible through associated GitHub repositories. I am also an open-source software developer/maintainer, currently for two R packages that focus on making next-gen DNA sequence data analysis automated, reproducible, and user-friendly.
If you find my publications interesting or my software packages useful, I’d love to hear from you at devonderaad[at]gmail[dot]com. I’m always open to feedback or new collaborations!