Alexandra Tyers

I pursue research with an interdisciplinary approach involving extensive field work, behavioural observations and laboratory experiments, morphological analyses, and molecular and microbial ecology, to understand adaptation and divergence in rapidly radiating taxa such as desert rodents and African fish.

After completing my PhD on speciation of haplochromine cichlid fish with Prof. Turner in the Molecular Ecology and Fisheries Genetics Lab at Bangor University in Wales (http://mefgl.bangor.ac.uk/), I continued as a postdoc for three years to further develop recently discovered Tanzanian crater lake cichlids as a model system for sympatric, allopatric, and parallel speciation. Following this, I  spent three years at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, where I managed the laboratory of Dr. Valenzano  (https://valenzano-lab.github.io/labsite/) and conducted research on life-history, behaviour, and microbiome divergence in African annual killifish.

I am currently using Sahara-Sahelian rodents as a model system to study mammalian divergence and speciation through a variety of pre- and post-zygotic mechanisms, and developing projects to test the multiple hypotheses surrounding their modes of adaptation to extreme and varying environments (including behaviour, physiology, microbiome) and identify long and short term evolutionary and plastic responses.