Notes to prospective graduate students in the Edwards lab
Thank you for your interest in our laboratory. Here are some things to think about if you are curious about graduate life in the Edwards lab.
As PI of the lab, the main things I look for in prospective students are research experience, curiosity and a breadth of interest, from molecules to ecology. Laboratories that study birds tend to attract students interested in ecology and behavior,and we share those interests. For better or worse, we tend to see most of biology through the lens of genetics. For this reason, we are particularly excited about prospective lab members with a serious interest in genetics as well as the many other facets of avian biology that deserve study. Although much of the primary data we generate comes from the lab bench, we encourage fieldwork and forging rigorous links between genetics ecology and behavior. We happen also to be part of one of the greatest collections of comparative biology on the planet, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and hence we encourage questions and fieldwork that can augment and benefit from these collections. Parasites, morphological evolution, geographic information data - you would be amazed what insights inert bird specimens can provide!
One distinguishing feature of our lab is our shared desire to push the boundaries on many different levels. Here at Harvard, with its access to fantastic genomics facilities such as the FAS Center for Systems Biology and the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute, we have great opportunities to embrace genomics technologies and apply them to creatures that are otherwise genetically unknown. We generally look for lab members who have a willingness to take advantage of our great opportunities and go the extra mile with regard to laboratory techniques. For example, many prospective students interested in the lab are attracted to the prospect of addressing behavioral or ecological questions using novel genes, such as the Mhc or genes involved with sperm recognition (see our recent PNAS paper). This is an excellent direction to go for a dissertation, and we encourage you to frame your question in such a way as to embrace emerging genomics technologies. We believe strongly that students of ornithology need to adopt a broad perspective to their work so that when they graduate their research will appeal not only to other ornithologists but also to the many evolutionary and molecular biologists who may not have a primary interest in birds. One of the most effective ways to do this is to adopt cutting-edge molecular or statistical approaches to your problem. Our lab discovered long ago that PCR and sequencing - although extremely useful and versatile approaches - have their limitations with many evolutionary genetics questions. For this reason we now routinely use diverse approaches and genomics resources, such as creating and screening BAC libraries, microarrays or novel population genetic analyses. Adopting such approaches almost always requires more time and effort in the lab than traditional methods from molecular ecology, but characterizing genes in this way almost always opens up whole new vistas for exploration. So by all means dive in – we’re here to teach you. But it’s good to consider carefully the trajectory of our lab and whether your interests lie primarily in fieldwork and ecology or in genetics and evolution. Students that thrive in our lab have a strong interest all of these. We look forward to your application!
Information and Opportunities for Postdoctoral Fellows
Postdoctoral Fellows in the lab pursue a variety of topics and are welcome to plug into any of our current research projects. Bryan Jennings is currently supported by an NSF grant to study Australian bird phylogeography. We have recently received NSF funds to construct BAC libraries from 5 Reptilia: Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta), Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), South American Worm Lizard (an amphisbaenian; Amphisbaea alba), American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), and Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae). Zhenshan Wang has been constructing BAC libraries from the Tuatara and Emu under this grant, and has also conducted extensive research on house finch genetics and evolution on our collaborative Integrated Research Challenges in Environmental Biology (IRCEB) grant with Geoff Hill and Sharon Roberts of Auburn University. Under our BAC grant, Andrew Shedlock is analyzing genome architecture in reptiles using the Alligator and Turtle libraries. If you would like to explore postdoctoral opportunities with the Edwards lab, please contact Scott. Both NIH and NSF support postdoctoral research in a variety of areas relevant to our laboratory. Highly recommended is the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics. In its first year, this fellowship appeared very supportive of research in the arenas of molecular evolution, phylogeography and conservation genetics and may be even more sympathetic to projects in the areas of comparative genomics. For example, Robb Brumfield's work on speciation in neotropical birds in our lab was funded on such a fellowship. Sharon Birks' work was supported by a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan/NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Evolution, a program that is sadly not continuing.
We welcome inquiries for postdoctoral research in our laboratory.