I study genotypic variation in chile pepper as it relates to endurance under abiotic and biotic stress. This includes genome-wide approaches to associate alleles with climatic variation in environments-of-origin, as well as disease response variation when subjected to root rot by the oomycete Phytophthora capsici. I map allelic variation at putatively adaptive loci throughout pepper's center-of-domestication in Mexico, both in space and time.
Why OSU?
The Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, and particularly my advisors, offer graduate students both the worlds of evolutionary ecology and applied plant genetics - two of my favorite things.
