Dr. Elizabeth Hadly
Department of Biology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5020

hadly@stanford.edu
650.725.2655 (phone )
650.723.0589 (fax)

I am a fourth-year graduate student broadly interested in the influence of space and time on the evolution and distribution of species. I received my undergraduate degree in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution from U.C. San Diego in 2000, after which I worked for the Forest Service in Oregon and northern California for 2 years. I received my Master's degree from Humboldt State University in 2005, where I worked with Brian Arbogast and investigated the relative utility of mtDNA and AFLP in assessing patterns of genetic variation in an endemic arboreal vole, Arborimus pomo. For my dissertation research at Stanford, I am investigating how populations and communities have responded to environmental change over the past 20,000 years. I am approaching this topic from a number of different angles. First, I modeled the spatial and temporal response of body size to climate within the California ground squirrel, Spermophilus beecheyi. Additionally, I excavated a Holocene and late Pleistocene cave deposit in northern California and am documenting change in the mammalian community in northern California over the past 20,000 years. Finally, I plan to look at the morphologic and genetic response of key taxa to the substantial environmental changes that have occurred over this time period. My overall goal is to gain a better understanding of how species and community responded to climatic change in the past to better predict how species will respond to climatic change today and into the future.

I am a PhD graduate student, and I am broadly interested in how development and evolution are controlled by environment and climate, and how the genetics of populations change over time. Currently, I am pursuing a project analyzing the phylogeography of Yellowstone Ambystoma tigrinum salamanders during the late Holocene. By extracting mitochondrial DNA from ancient salamander vertebrae, I have been able to study genetic changes through time. I want to know how climatic change affected genetic and non-genetic metamorphic changes over the past 3000 years. Similarly in modern populations of Ambystoma, I want to study metamorphic and genetic changes in response to different environments in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. I will also be analyzing the genetic changes controlling metamorphic timing and heterochrony during Ambystoma development. I received my bachelors degree from Mount Holyoke College in 2004.