Event Category

Exit Seminar

Date

September 8, 2026

Time

1:10 pm

Location

Ramsay Wright Laboratories, RW 432

Speciation—the ultimate source of biodiversity—has fascinated scientists for centuries, producing a vibrant research field aimed at undercovering the evolutionary forces fueling this process. Recently, coevolution between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes (“mitonuclear coevolution”) has been proposed to act as a crucial driver of eukaryotic speciation due to its presumed pervasiveness across systems and its ability to quickly generate intrinsic reproductive barriers (“mitonuclear incompatibilities”) between diverging taxa.

In Nikelski’s dissertation, the author utilized genomic analyses applied across three evolutionary scales to explore the role of mitonuclear coevolution in promoting avian speciation.

Overall, this thesis furthers our understanding of mitonuclear coevolutionary dynamics across avian systems and, in doing so, provides valuable insight on the hypothesized association between mitonuclear coevolution and eukaryotic speciation.

Supervisor: Jason Weir

Committee chair: Aneil Agrawal