Jacob Crawford

I'm currently an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the Nielsen lab at UC Berkeley. I've been studying mosquitoes since 2003. I have conducted field-based studies, laboratory or semi-field ecological studies, as well as computational studies. Among other things, I'm interested in how mosquitoes adapt to their environment and how these eco-evolutionary dynamics can impact disease transmission. My PhD research focused on short and longterm evolutionary dynamics in the Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. These mosquitoes exist as a series of species and subspecies that sometimes hybridize. I used population genetic approaches to show that these groups experience distinct natural selection regimes and have a complex history of speciation and population size changes. I hope to bring the tools and expertise I've acquired to bear on questions about adaptation in the Asian Tiger mosquito.

August 2014