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Research in my lab is broadly focused on understanding the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. We are particularly interested in the role of ecological adaptation in the formation of new species and understanding the factors that promote or constrain evolutionary responses to environmental change. The lab takes an integrative approach to investigating how ecological processes, biogeography, physiological systems, genetic variation, and genomic architecture interact during the origin of species and adaptation to novel niches and changing environments. While these fundamental questions pertain to all of the living world, our research program is more specifically focused on some of the most successful and diverse organisms on the planet: plant- feeding insects and their specialist parasitoids. The lab has a special interest in understanding the evolution of insect life history timing and its role in both speciation and adaptation to climate change.
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The lab is part of the Department of Biological Sciences at Binghamton University, one of the four University Centers in the SUNY system and one of the premier public universities in the Northeast. We're located on a 900 acre campus near the North Branch of Susquehanna River as it cuts through the Allegheny Plateau.
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Lab News
May 2025 - We're excited that after three years as an integral member of the lab, Mena Coles-Carruthers (undergraduate Honors Thesis and BU Summer Scholar's student) will be continuing her career in ecological genomics as a PhD student in the Dopman lab at Tufts! Oct. 2024 - Congratulations to Dr. Gabby Quartuccia on successfully defending her PhD on population genomics and trait variation along the speciation continuum in Aphaenogaster ants. Gabby will be joining Steve Frank's lab at Fordham as a postdoc on a project examining drought tolerance in rice. Jun. 2023 - New paper out in Ecology Letters, led by former postdoc Alycia Lackey: Simulated climate warming causes asymmetric responses in insect life history timing potentially disrupting a classic ecological speciation system. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14268 See Bing News Release and Coverage in Newsweek and Publico Sep. 2020 - New paper out in PNAS with Eddy Dowle, Greg Ragland, et al. on genomics and transcriptomics of divergent seasonal adaptation underlying speciation in Rhagoletis https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002357117 |
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Thomas H. Q. Powell
Department of Biological Sciences PO Box 6000 4400 Vestal Parkway East Binghamton, NY 13901 |
Office: Science III 112
Lab: Science III 184 email: powellt"at"binghamton"dot"edu Phone: 607-777-4439 Dept. Fax: 607-777-6521 |