My research in the Morehouse lab concerns the impacts of habitat diversity on the evolution of both sensory systems and organismal diversity. My work in the jumping spider genus Habronattus focuses on quantifying the visual components of male courtship displays across numerous species, and contrasting those displays to the environments they display in. By filming courtship displays with multiple cameras, I computationally reconstruct those movements in three dimensions and correlate it with particular types of habitat motion extracted from field videos. In the case of Habronattus color signals, I am using cutting-edge hyperspectral camera imaging to sample thousands of spectra we can use to determine color discriminability relative to spider habitat.

I am also pursuing more computational approaches to understanding the importance of habitat variation on evolution. First, I am measuring varying biomes using the aforementioned hyperspectral camera and using clustering techniques to quantify primary sources of visual variation within and between habitat types. Second, I am using a Receptor Noise Limited framework to explore color discrimination spaces and identify optimal visual system configurations. By exploring how discriminability is impacted as our simulations move between varying numbers of photoreceptor channels, I investigate what circumstances most advantage the evolution of increasingly complex color vision.

I first started doing research in Keith Crandall’s lab during my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University. In addition to curating information that would contribute to the Decapod portion of the Tree of Life Project, I worked on a project interested in clarifying phylogenetic relationships and ancestral states of polyomaviruses. I later joined Seth Bybee’s lab, where I worked on large-scale Odonate systematics.

While a research assistant with Jeremy Brown at Louisiana State University, I continued focusing on phylogenetic questions. I worked primarily on exploring ways to account for site rate heterogeneity in ultraconserved elements, although I was also involved in projects exploring methods to visualize phylogenetic signals. Additionally, we did exploratory analyses for incorporating norovirus phylogenetics into models predicting viral outbreaks in oyster beds.

My first teaching experience was as an undergraduate, where I was the teaching assistant for the newly minted Introduction to Bioinformatics class at BYU. Over the first couple years, I was able to assist in developing novel curriculum that helped students build hard skills that translated into increased ability to participate in undergraduate research. I learned that undergraduate biology classes could teach relevant skillsets which inform research potential, and that my own research experience could make me a better instructor. 

While at LSU I had the opportunity to teach a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) lab which focused on real research output in the undergraduate classroom. Undergraduates were able to learn skills which immediately translated into employment potential and interest in research. Since then, at UC I have taught diverse undergraduate labs such as Ecology and Evolution, Introductory Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology. I feel strongly about giving undergraduate students opportunities to learn practical skills while performing real science, and I am excited to bring this stance with me into future classes I teach. 

Huang, Wen, Guifang Zhou, Melissa Marchand, Jeremy R. Ash, David Morris, Paul Van Dooren, Jeremy M. Brown, Kyle A. Gallivan, and Jim C. Wilgenbusch. 2016. TreeScaper: visualizing and extracting phylogenetic signal from sets of trees. Molecular Biology and Evolution 33(12): 3314-3316.