Prof. Robin Hopkins

The Hopkins lab investigates how and why biodiversity is generated and maintained by studying the evolutionary mechanisms driving speciation. Our research integrates the fields of population genetics, systematics, molecular evolution, and ecology by bridging the gap between micro and macro evolutionary study. Speciation results from the buildup of reproductive barriers that decrease gene flow between diverging lineages. Our work aims to characterize and quantify the forces of selection, mutation, and gene flow as they interact during the evolution of reproductive isolation. We investigate the consequences of hybridization both at the proximate level in patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation and at the ultimate level in patterns of evolutionary outcomes. Our work tests fundamental hypotheses about how and why species are formed by synthesizing results from organismal field-based studies with molecular genomic studies.