Dr. Carmela Jeanne Dönz

I recently finished my PhD in the Biodiversity Dynamics group, supervised by Ole Seehausen and stay on for a few months as a postdoc

Research interest

I’m fascinated by the diversity of life at all its levels and I have a broad interest in its origin, persistence and loss. Seeking to gain a holistic understanding of the dynamics of biodiversity, my fields of interest range from evolutionary biology, ecology, macroevolution, speciation and adaptive radiation to population genetics and genomics. Currently, I’m especially interested in which factors and processes cause variation in species and ecomorphological diversity in lacustrine fish. 

Research project

My dissertation is centered around the question of how lineages affect each other during the diversification process, specifically in the case of sympatric adaptive radiation in lacustrine fishes. I am addressing this question using a comparative approach with morphological, ecological, and genomic data from postglacial radiations of charr and whitefish in Swiss pre-alpine and Greenlandic lakes. My current focus is using genome-wide RAD-tag sequencing to assess genomic differentiation in a phenotypically exceptionally rich community of charr in a pre-alpine lake and to disentangle the contribution of sympatric diversification versus recent, potentially anthropogenically mediated admixture of allopatric species to this exceptional phenotypic diversity.

Curriculum Vitae

please also visit my personal Eawag homepage