Nathan Upham: 'No Mammal is an Island'

Please join us for Nathan Upham's presentation: 'No Mammal is an Island: what Evolutionary history tells us about Species, Interactions, and emerging Diseases'.

Understanding how species interact—and how those interactions shape evolution—is a central question in modern biology. Research in the Upham Lab of Phylogenetic Ecology integrates evolutionary history, ecology, and genomics of wild mammals to understand how species diversity is generated and structured by biotic interactions. They ask how phylogenetic relationships predict interactions between mammals and their microbial symbionts (e.g., lung fungi, liver viruses, gut bacteria), which can in turn be used to model wildlife disease transmission to humans. By combining global biodiversity data with specimen-based field research on wild rodents and bats in the Sonoran Desert, their research connects processes across scales, from the origins and boundaries of species to ecological interactions and emerging infectious diseases.