Academic Training

Ph.D. (Yeast Genetics) Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville 1993
Postdoc (Canine Genetics) Univ. of California, Berkeley 1999

Research Interests

I am fascinated by the behavioral diversity of the domestic dog. Action patterns such as herding, retrieving, pointing, etc. have evolved under artificial selection. As a consequence, the underlying architectures governing these trait differences are likely to be simple and genetically tractable.

Heritable differences in behavior, in addition to variation in size and shape, afford an opportunity to access the biological processes that play an important role in generating mammalian diversity. Thus the dog provides a model for understanding evolutionary change, with the advantage of drawing upon an extant progenitor species (i.e., canis lupus) for couching this variation in an evo-devo context.

Keywords

Behavioral genetics, identity-by-descent, quantitative genetics, linkage disequilibrium, whole-breed genealogy

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