Team Bio

Our research team consists of Ellie Armstrong, Rosemary Gillespie, and Stefan Prost. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Ellie took a spider biology class with Rosie and then began working in her lab. They have continued to work together for the past several years on projects that span ecology and evolution in the Hawaiian Islands. Stefan got involved as a post-doctoral researcher at Berkeley, where he collaborated with Rosie's lab on genetic and genomic work in Hawaiian arthropods.

Ellie Armstrong

My name is Ellie and I am a new PhD student at Stanford University working with Dmitri Petrov and Liz Hadly. It is my goal to combine ecology and genomics in order to gain a better understanding of how species diversify. More specifically, I am interested in species in adaptive radiations which occur frequently on islands (such as Hawaii!). Most of my work so far has been on Hawaiian picture-wing Drosophila and other Hawaiian lineages, which I believe are super important to understand evolution and variation. In addition, bringing attention to the awesome diversity in Hawaii can help us to protect those ecosystems. I am also involved in projects which aim to make genomic techniques available to researchers in the field so that we can more easily track and identify animals without having to catch or trap them. I have a strong background in bioinformatics, genomics, and ecology. Previously, I received a B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology from UC Berkeley, and received an M.S. from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where I studied genomic evolution in picture-wings.

Stefan Prost

My name is Stefan, I am a postdoc in Dmitri Petrov's lab at Stanford University and a visiting researcher in the lab of Noah Whiteman at the University of California, Berkeley. I am interested in how species adapt to new or changing environments on the genome level. Decrypting the information stored in the genome of an organism starts with a good genome assembly. Spiders show exciting adaptations to the environment they live in, but also have notoriously difficult genomes. I am really looking forward to the challenge of reconstructing a high quality genome for the happy face spider and studying its diverse and exciting color pattern. Beside spiders, I work on genome assemblies throughout the tree of life and evolutionary genomics of birds of paradise, foxes and other vertebrates.

Rosemary Gillespie

I am a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Schlinger Chair in Systematics. I am married to George Roderick, who studies invasive insects, and have two sons, Will and Mel, who are now in college. I was born and educated in Scotland, and received a B.Sc. in Zoology from Edinburgh University in 1980. I came to the U.S. to conduct graduate work on the behavioral ecology of spiders at the University of Tennessee. After my PhD I spent several months at the University of South in Tennessee, and then started work at the University of Hawaii in 1987, initially as a postdoc, and then in 1992 as Assistant Professor in Zoology and Researcher in the Hawaiian Evolutionary Biology program. In Hawaii, I started working on happy face spiders, and also discovered an adaptive radiation of long-jawed (Tetragnatha) spiders. I joined the faculty at the University of California in Berkeley in 1999, where I continue to focus my research on the islands of the Pacific as microcosms for studying how biodiversity forms and goes extinct.

For the Hawaiian happy face spider, we have shown that the so-called “exuberant” color polymorphism is similar in all populations across the different islands where it occurs. Interestingly, the genetic basis for the color polymorphism has changed as they have established new populations on new islands, with selection acting to recover the diversity of color forms from the few individuals that colonized the new island. What is the molecular basis for this change? Our team has a system, as well as the tools and expertise, to answer this question, and hence resolve the age-old question: How is diversity recovered subsequent to a population bottleneck?