Biography
Members of the Rheindt Lab have in common a fascination for biodiversity and its underlying evolutionary processes. With the on-going biodiversity crisis on our planet, we are also interested in how knowledge of evolutionary processes can inform conservation.
Most of our research activities focus on the mechanisms that lead to – or sometimes act against – the build-up of biodiversity, such as genetic differentiation and introgression. Birds are our main model organism because their well-known distribution and life-history make them a suitable object for evolutionary studies. Pursuing a research project at my lab usually involves the application of a variety of laboratory approaches and contemporary computational tools, with a more recent focus on phylogenomic methods using Next-Generation sequencing approaches. Fieldwork is often, but not always, an important component of my students’ work.