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Welcome - Hare Lab

Research Interests:
Population and conservation genetics of marine organisms, invasion biology, phylogeography, and host-parasite co-evolution.

Matt Hare

Research Goals:
My research goals are to understand the ecological, demographic and historical processes that generate population substructure and species diversity in coastal marine ecosystems, and to make these findings relevant to conservation and management when possible. In marine environments there are few absolute barriers to dispersal, yet population genetic substructure and cryptic species are common in marine taxa with high dispersal potential. This implicates cryptic physical barriers to dispersal or strong diversifying selection generating population substructure. My work focuses on both these possibilities by using genetic markers to test for larval retention and nonrandom gene flow limiting population admixture, and by testing for the effects of natural selection at both genetic and phenotypic levels. Conventional means of studying these population processes are made difficult in the diverse taxa studied in the Hare lab because of their small size (e.g., invertebrate larvae, protozoan parasites, copepods), phenotypic plasticity of adults, or parasitic life cycles. By analyzing genetic variation using approaches from population genetics, phylogeography and landscape ecology, my research overcomes some of these obstacles and infers population processes affecting spatial connectivity at both ecological and evolutionary time scales. My applied conservation genetics research focuses these approaches on species/populations of concern or involves development of genetic tools to support conservation and restoration goals.

Graduate Student Recruiting

I recruit graduate students through Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology graduate fields. Currently I am interested in graduate school applicants with computer programming and bioinformatics skills/interests. Your choice of graduate field to apply through will depend on your research and career interests.

I am currently recruiting a MS/PhD student to study larval dispersal and functional genetics of oyster survivorship using genomic DNA sequence analyses of wild-sampled oysters and genome mapping of inbred lines. A two year New York Sea Grant Scholar Fellowship is available to support a student beginning May or August 2012 (pending federal funding of NOAA/Seagrant).

The hypotheses being tested are motivated by the need to optimize oyster restoration procedures with respect to choice of broodstock and spatial arrangement of restored reefs. Further motivation comes from basic evolutionary genetics questions about functional genetic differentiation across physical environmental gradients within estuaries. The primary fellowship focus will be the application of bioinformatic tools to achieve population genomic analyses. Therefore, preferred applicants will have some programming ability and/or bioinformatics experience and want to apply it in novel ways to study natural populations. Some field work and data collection also will be required.

Interested applicants should send a CV/resume, a cover letter stating graduate school and career goals, unofficial transcripts and GRE scores, plus names and contact info for three references to Matt Hare. Electronic (email) submission of application materials is encouraged. Application Deadline: January 15th but earlier submission is encouraged. If you are selected for this fellowship then I will request that you send official application materials for the Natural Resources Graduate Field to the Cornell University graduate school. The Hare lab is part of the larger population genomics community at Cornell and is a member of the Cornell Center for Comparative and Population Genomics.

Hare Lab at the Cornell Dairy