Three MEEP students receive their PhDs

Three students from the MEEP Lab have been awarded their doctorates in the past few weeks.

Andrew Ritchie was awarded a PhD for his thesis “Evaluating the performance of diversification models for reconstructing evolutionary history”. Chapters of the thesis have been published in Organisms Diversity & Evolution and in Systematic Biology. Andrew is about to commence a postdoctoral research position with Dr David Liberles at Temple University in the USA.

Charles Foster submitted a thesis entitled “Using phylogenomic data to untangle the patterns and timescale of flowering plant evolution”, which contained several chapters that have been published as journal articles. These include “Evaluating the impact of genomic data and priors on Bayesian estimates of the angiosperm evolutionary timescale”, which was published last year in Systematic Biology. Charles remains in the MEEP Lab as an affiliate researcher.

Jun Tong has been awarded a PhD for his thesis “Investigating evolutionary history using phylogenomics”. This thesis covered a broad range of topics and its chapters have been published in several different journals, including Science and PeerJ. For the past few months, Jun has been employed in the private sector.

Congratulations to Andrew, Charles, and Jun!