Marjorie F Oleksiak

My research addresses the fundamental importance of the variation among individuals and populations and how species adapt to environmental change. Using genomic approaches combined with quantitative analyses, we now can explicitly quantify the expression of thousands of genes and define the frequency of DNA sequence variation among individuals and populations. The research focus is to define the biological importance of this variation. To define the biological importance, we interrogate genomic data using evolutionary analyses and quantitative measures of animal physiology. Much of this research focuses on populations of the teleost Fundulus heteroclitus that have adapted to many different environments. These investigations address a broader interest of mine: the variation among individuals within a population and why some individuals are more robust to environmental changes.