Welcome

I'm Jeremy Yoder, a postdoctoral associate working with Peter Tiffin in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota. This is my website.

Research interests

In the closing paragraph of The Origin of Species, Darwin contrasts the monotonous mechanics of the nonliving world with the baroque diversity of life: " ... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Today this contrast is borne out by ecological and evolutionary research suggesting that biotic interactions may be more important to the diversification of life than the abiotic environment. See, for example, Schluter's The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation and Thompson's The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution. Understanding the intricacies of biotic interactions and their contribution to the history of life is therefore of central importance to evolutionary biology.

My research seeks to understand the forms of coevolutionary selection created by interactions between species—plants and pollinators, hosts and parasites, predators and prey—and the importance of this selection over the evolutionary history of life on Earth. My doctoral dissertation work with Olle Pellmyr at the University of Idaho applied theoretical, phylogenetic, and population genetic approaches to examine the origins and evolutionary trajectories of species interactions, with particular focus on the yucca-yucca moth mutualism. I am presently a postdoctoral associate working with Peter Tiffin at the University of Minnesota, using genome-scale genetic data to examine patterns of local adaptation in the model legume Medicago truncatula, as part of the Medicago Hapmap Project