Matthew Hare, Cornell University
Associate Professor
Ithaca, New York
mph75@cornell.edu
Office:
(607) 255-5685
Expert In
Bio/Research
Matt's research goals are to understand the ecological, demographic and historical processes that generate population substructure and species diversity in coastal marine ecosystems, and to make these findings relevant to conservation and management when possible. In marine environments there are...
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Bio/Research
Matt's research goals are to understand the ecological, demographic and historical processes that generate population substructure and species diversity in coastal marine ecosystems, and to make these findings relevant to conservation and management when possible. In marine environments there are few absolute barriers to dispersal, yet population genetic substructure and cryptic species are common in marine taxa that have high dispersal potential. This implicates cryptic barriers to dispersal or strong diversifying selection generating population substructure. Matt's work focuses on both these possibilities by using genetic markers to test for larval retention and nonrandom dispersal limiting population admixture, and by testing for the effects of natural selection at both genetic and phenotypic levels. Conventional means of studying these population processes are made difficult in the diverse taxa studied in the Hare lab because of their small size (e.g., invertebrate larvae, protozoan parasites, copepods), phenotypic plasticity of adults, or parasitic life cycles. By analyzing genetic variation using phylogenetic, population genetic and biogeographic frameworks, Matt's research overcomes some of these obstacles and infers population processes affecting spatial connectivity at both ecological and evolutionary time scales.
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