EEB student Owen Dorsey graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014 with a BS in Biology. After graduation, he took a couple of years off, working as a laboratory technologist at the American Red Cross, before starting his MS work at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. For his research, he investigated inbreeding avoidance and mate choice behavior in the invasive western mosquitofish (a close relative of swordtails!) using a combination of behavioral assays and genetic analyses.
Owen joined the Rosenthal lab in 2019 and is broadly interested in studying the fitness consequences of inbreeding and the evolution of pre- and post- copulatory mechanisms to avoid inbreeding. Owen plans to investigate the “cost-benefit” to inbreeding in swordtails.