Nik Vetr
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I’m a PhD student in the Evolutionary Wing of the Paleoanthropology Department at UC-Davis. In undergrad, I studied evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology, fields which broadly intersect to inform my study of paleoanthropology, biostatistics, and population biology now. My current research interests lie largely in the development and application of statistical phylogenetic methods to questions of morphological evolution in humans and close relatives. The last few decades have seen plenty of progress with respect to inferring evolutionary trees from genetic data, and there are now some very sophisticated things you can do with, say, nucleotide or amino acid sequence alignments. Not as much focus has been directed towards morphology, however, and the validity of our estimates using currently available methods is sometimes questionable. This is problematic if we want to infer phylogeny for really old, extinct taxa, since even under conditions of exceptional preservation there's little viable ancient DNA left in specimens older than a few 100ky. To hopefully help remedy this problem, I’m working to expand and improve model-based methods of estimating evolutionary relationships using morphological datasets and seeing if I can fare any better than established approaches. Additionally, I’m interested in applying recently developed phylogenetic comparative methods to test various adaptive hypotheses of relevance to human evolution, such as whether patterns of dental, craniofacial, or postcranial variation in extant and extinct humans are shaped by selection (or have arisen by genetic drift, or neither), as might be expected from macroecological trends like Bergmann's and Allen's rules.
I also quite enjoy teaching, so when I’m not busy with research I give outreach presentations and occasionally TA and instruct classes – a captive audience to chat with about neat stuff, what’s not to love?! And I think technology's really nifty, so I'm also trying to develop new educational resources to better teach students about topics ranging from treethinking to the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System. When not working, I like to spend my free time playing board/video games, navel-gazing, hiking, traveling, talking, listening, exploring new hobbies, consuming various media, participating in various charities dedicated to global poverty reduction and animal welfare, exercising, coding, and thinking very, very hard about paleoanthropology. |
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204 Young Hall
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