I am an Envision PhD student interested in understanding evolutionary processes across populations and species, at phenotypic and genotypic levels.

For my PhD, I am investigating the repeated adaptation of Silene uniflora (Sea campion) populations to heavy-metal contaminated soils across the UK and Europe. I want to understand better the causes and consequences of this adaptation. In particular, I will determine whether hybridisation with a neighbouring species, Silene vulgaris, may have introduced alleles that are adaptive against heavy metals. Additionally, I am interested in whether colonisation of heavy metal contaminated mine sites is associated with increased reproductive isolation from ancestral coastal populations. I will integrate both genomic and experimental data to help investigate these topics.

For my Masters dissertation, I worked with researchers from Queen Mary University and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, to study the genomics of ash tree responses to ash dieback disease. I used signals of convergent evolution between multiple pairs of ash species to detect potential loci associated with resistance to the disease.

Address: 3^rd Floor, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology/Environment Centre Wales, Bangor University, Bangor

Email address: src20cjh@bangor.ac.uk