Natalie Graham

Graduate Student

Email | n.graham@berkeley.edu
Office | Hilgard 221
Curriculum vitae | NR_Graham_2020_CV
Research area | Species Diversification Mechanisms / Ecological Networks / Biological Invasions / Biological Control

Research Interests

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley working with Dr. Rosemary Gillespie. I have a MS Biology from Sonoma State University where I worked with Dr. Derek Girman and Dr. Brian Fisher investigating a group of ants from Madagascar that have specialized across the island due to divergent colony reproductive strategies and variable microhabitats.

I am broadly interested in species diversification mechanisms of insular fauna and how communities change over time; in particular, how anthropogenic changes are altering species interactions and potentially driving rapid evolution. To investigate these questions I study arthropod communities in the Hawaiian archipelago that include endemic and native species as well as accidental and purposeful introductions. I exploit the natural occurrence of age-structured terrains on the archipelago that represent communities in an assembly continuum at sites dating from 44 years to 5.5 million years in geological age.

For my dissertation, I am: (1) Taking a phylogenomic approach to examine long-term evolutionary mechanisms in species radiations of three focal lineages of arthropods: wasps, beetles and spiders (2) Taking a data science approach to assembling ecological networks of parasitoid-host, plant-herbivore, predator-prey and pollinator-flower associations of both native and non-native species for communities of different age, elevation, and habitat modification regime (3) Taking a landscape genomic approach to investigate the axes for population differentiation of an ecologically dominate escaped biological control agent, to further understand the role of natural enemies introduced for biological control in ecological communities and track genomic signatures of invasion.

My aim is to develop efficient molecular biodiversity assessment pipelines that leverage genomic, spatial and ecological network information to capture global change phenomena of the world’s biotas.

Publications