14th Annual G.E. Scudder Lecture in Entomology: Dr. Jessica Ware, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University
Join Jessica Ware, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University for a lecture on Dragonfly and Dictyoptera systematics: understanding insect evolutionary histories using molecular and morphological tools
Details:
Thursday, March 23rd
4pm
Allan Yap Biodiversity Auditorium, Beaty Biodiversity Museum
Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.
Insects are diverse and abundant, with complex ecological and evolutionary histories. We use genomic and phenomic tools to reconstruct robust phylogenies of Dictyoptera (termites, cockroaches and mantises) and Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). Understanding the systematics of Dictyoptera allows us to test the drivers of diversification in the termites, social myopic roaches, which diverged prior to the evolution of Angiosperms. Reconstructing phylogenies of Odonata, which are colourful, acrobatic predators, are useful in our studies of flight and reproductive behaviors. Here I present data from population level, family level and ordinal level systematics work, to fit the evolution of these charismatic insects into our larger transcriptomic studies of Insect evolution.
Dr. Jessica L. Ware graduated from UBC in 2001. While an undergraduate, she worked in the labs (and museum) of Geoff Scudder, Karen Needham, Judith Myers and Diane Srivastava. She received her PhD in Entomology from Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ, in 2008, where she focused on the evolution of Dictyoptera and Odonata under Dr. Michael L. May. She successfully wrote an NSF Postdoctoral fellowship on termite evolution, which she undertook at the American Museum of Natural History with Dr. David Grimaldi from 2008-2010. She began her current position in the Department of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ in September 2010; she received tenure in 2016. Her research program currently focuses on termite, cockroach, and odonate evolution, and she is an active member of the international 1KITE transcriptome evolution group studying insect evolution. She has two NSF grants currently, to evaluate how diet has driven diversification rate shifts in termites, and to create the automatic identification system ODOMATIC for odonates, which uses neural networks and automated feature extraction. She is the past president of the Systematics Biodiversity and Evolution section of the Entomological Society of America, the current secretary of the World Dragonfly Association, and serves on the board for the Society of Systematic Biology.