People
Principal Investigator: Deren Eaton
Deren Eaton (de2356@columbia.edu) is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
(E3B) at Columbia University.
He is an evolutionary biologist and botanist with broad interests
in plant biodiversity – from the scale of global patterns and community
assembly, to speciation and genetic variation within species.
Deren’s research is rooted in organismal biology and fieldwork,
with projects focused in the Tibetan plateau and cloud forests of
Central and South America. A common theme across his work
is the development of new computational or statistical methods
for analyzing comparative data, and the implementation and
support for reproducible science. Deren completed a
postdoc at Yale in 2017; earned his PhD from the University
of Chicago in 2014; and his BSc from the University of Minnesota in
2007.
Post-doctoral Researchers
Sandra Hoffberg (slh2181@columbia.edu) joined the lab
in 2017 as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow.
Sandra’s work is focused on the development of tools and resources to
expedite large-scale genotyping and bioinformatic analyses of
germplasm databases (i.e., seed databases) for agriculture and
plant breeding research. Her work combines genomics, phylogenetics,
and functional trait evolution to study invasiveness and
herbicide resistance. Sandra completed her PhD in 2017 at the
University of Georgia where she studied Wisteria and
Kudzu and worked on the development of new genomic library protocols
3RAD and RADcap.
Carlos Alonso Maya Lastra (cam2384@columbia.edu) joined the lab
in 2019 as an Postdoctoral Researcher. Carlos is a computational biologist,
botanist, and systematist. His research interests include Euphorbiaceae
phylogeny and systematics of Cnidoscolus (More info:
http://camayal.info/). He is working in the Eaton
lab to investigate phylogeny and introgression in Viburnum using genomic
RAD-seq data, and on modeling speciation and gene flow of wild and
domesticated crop species using forward-in-time simulations. Carlos
completed his PhD in 2018 from the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa, Mexico.
Graduate Students
Patrick McKenzie
(pfm2119@columbia.edu)
joined the lab in 2017 and was a recipient of an NSF Graduate Research
Fellowship (GRFP). Patrick’s PhD thesis research will investigate phylogeny,
introgression, and floral evolution in Monarda and Pedicularis,
and involves developing new machine learning inference methods.
He completed his Bachelors degree at the University of Tennessee.
Jared Meek
(jared.meek@columbia.edu)
joined the lab in 2018 and is interested in plant biodiversity,
phylogenetics, and conservation. His thesis research is focused on
developing comparative phylogeographic methods for comparing contemporary
and historical plant collections to detect recent human mediated gene flow
in the Hengduan Mountains. He completed his Bachelors degree at Brigham
Young University.
Guo Cen
(gc2799@columbia.edu)
is a visiting Ph.D. student from the Chinese Academy of Sciences graduate
program at the Kunming Institute of Botany where she works with Dr. De-Zhu Li.
Her thesis research is on the phylogeny and diversification of temperate woody
bamboos using genomic sequence data.
Joining the lab
I’m looking to recruit talented
post-docs and student to work on independent projects and/or to join
on-going projects in the lab. If interested please contact Deren,
especially if you are interested in pursuing fellowship proposals for the
coming year. Many opportunities are available, including NSF graduate and
postdoctoral fellowships, and internal Columbia fellowships.