Dr. Schumer completed her Bachelor’s degree at Reed College and her PhD at Princeton University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia for one year, and is currently a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Schumer’s research addresses questions related to the patterns and processes of hybridization. Evolutionary biologists have often envisioned speciation as an ordered process, where reproductive barriers arise and prevent gene flow between species; with the advent of high-throughput sequencing, it is now possible to more thoroughly examine the evolutionary history of species. Among many important findings, Dr. Schumer’s results in swordtail fish show that hybridization events can be more common than previously thought, and that large genomic fractions may be derived from hybridization, suggesting that hybridization makes major contributions to the genomic landscapes of modern species. Dr. Schumer’s work has appeared in the journals Evolution, eLIFE, PLoS Genetics, Molecular Ecology, and Science.

Learn more about the Dobzhansky Prize here [1].