Postdoctoral research associate

Molecular and Computational Biology

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)

Sergey V. Nuzhdin, Andrew Sih

I study the evolution and development of individual differences in behavior, using Drosophila melanogaster as a model.

I am interested in understanding individual differences in social behavior and how these differences affect the evolutionary process. D. melanogaster provides an ideal model for these questions because flies commonly aggregate in nature, and because the availability of inbred genotypes allows us to "re-create" the same individual repeatedly under controlled conditions.

In general, my work has illustrated that social decision-making and other mechanisms of social niche construction (SNC) can have important consequences for individual fitness, for both adults (Saltz and Foley 2011) and larvae (Saltz et al., in revision). Broadly, these results suggest that a much more complete understanding of SNC is necessary to make understand the evolution and development of social behavior and other phenotypes.

I encourage you to email me with ideas and questions.

2011 NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant

2006-2009 Fellow, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG)