Graduate Opportunity to Study Bumble Bee Population Genomics

We are looking for a PhD student (starting any time from Spring-Fall 2022) interested in large scale population-level genome sequencing of many US bumble bees. This is a collaboration with Heather Hines and Jonathan Koch, and the primary focus will be on species with color pattern variation, but there will be opportunities to analyze population genomics of bumble bees more generally. If sequencing lots of genomes from lots of bees from lots of species sounds like fun, shoot me an email! The full ad is pasted below.

PhD Position in Comparative Population Genomics of Bumble Bees and their
Color Patterns: 

A PhD position is available in the laboratory of Jeff Lozier at The University of Alabama (lozierlab.ua.edu) as part of a recently awarded NSF project: “How many routes to the same phenotype? Genetic changes underlying parallel acquisition of mimetic color patterns across bumble bees”. This project is a collaboration with Dr Heather Hines at Penn State (hineslab.org) and Dr Jonathan Koch at the USDA Bee Lab in Logan, UT (jonathanbkoch.weebly.com).

The PhD student will be involved in an interdisciplinary project to study the origins of color pattern variation in bumble bees. The focus of this position will be on comparative population genomics from whole genome resequencing of many North American bumble bee species. Range-wide whole genome data is already available in the lab for many bumble bee species, and the PhD student will be involved in additional field work and generation/analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. The student will also be able to make use of these extensive data sets to develop projects relating to conservation, evolutionary, and landscape genomics.

We are looking to recruit a highly motivated student with interests in applying modern molecular and computational tools in a charismatic and ecologically important non-model group. Students will join an active, diverse, collaborative, and friendly lab (lozierlab.ua.edu/people.html) and department (U Alabama Biological Sciences: bsc.ua.edu). We also expect substantial opportunities for collaboration with all PIs and students/postdocs associated with the project.

Contact Jeff Lozier (jlozier@ua.edu) for more information. The position is available starting Spring 2022 but students interested in Summer or Fall 2022 are also encouraged to apply.