Nina Overgaard Therkildsen’s research focuses on how contemporary environmental change and human impacts shape demographic, ecological, and microevolutionary processes within marine species. She is particularly interested in how human activities cause rapid evolution in many wild populations and ...
Nina Overgaard Therkildsen’s research focuses on how contemporary environmental change and human impacts shape demographic, ecological, and microevolutionary processes within marine species. She is particularly interested in how human activities cause rapid evolution in many wild populations and in the roles that ongoing genetic adaptation and geographic distribution shifts will play for species persistence in our rapidly changing world. Her core tools to address these questions are high-throughput DNA analysis methods that are opening completely new opportunities for population genomic studies of non-model organisms. A cornerstone of her research is to analyze time series of genomic data, which allow for direct tracking of changes over known time scales and therefore provide a unique opportunity to observe recent dynamics and microevolution in retrospective “real time”. Insights gained through this approach can be important for characterizing population structure in exploited species, and she is working actively to develop ways to use genomic analysis for improving marine conservation and fisheries management.