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.

September 2016