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Background
I was born in Florence, Alabama, a moderately sized city on the banks of the Tennessee River where I lived
for 18 years. I moved to Athens, Georgia for college, where I received a B.S. from the Department of Genetics
at the University of Georgia with Highest Honors. I was part of UGA's
Foundation Fellows program, which provided support for my studies
and research activities. My undergraduate senior honors thesis was with Jeff Bennetzen wehere I worked on description
of Fragaria vesca genome structure. I also worked for two years with Rich Meagher creating transgenic
Arabidopsis for phytoremediation of arsenic. After graduation, I moved to Cambridge, MA where I joined the
Hartl Lab for graduate school in 2006.
Research
I am primarily interested in mechanisms that cause rapid or drastic changes in the structure and content of
genomes and in assessing the evolutionary impact of different types of genomic changes. I am currently
working on chimeric genes, which are formed through the rearrangement of different segments of two coding
sequences. We have used bioinformatic techniques to find chimeric genes in Drosophila melanogaster
and are trying to assess their importance within Drosophila and in other sequenced organisms.
Publications
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Pontaroli, A. C., T. M. Davis, R. L. Rogers, P. SanMiguel, and J. L. Bennetzen.
2008. Gene content and distribution in the nuclear genome of Fragaria vesca. In prep.
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Rogers, R. L., T. Bedford, and D. L. Hartl. 2008. Formation and longevity of
chimeric and duplicate genes in Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics. In review.
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Haggerty, T., J. Garner and R. Rogers. 2005. Reproductive phenology in
Megalonaias nervosa (Bivalvia: Unionidae) in Wheeler Reservoir, Tennessee River, Alabama,
USA. Hydrobiologia 539: 131-136.
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